The painful path to Modernisation
posted by Lester Caine on 02 May 2025 (00:00 BST)

After what is best described as a couple of false starts, I seem to be finally making progress. The latest Rant covers most of the fun, but at a practical level, I simply had not appreciated that 'all' the autoloader does is looks up the relevant file of code. If we don't actually use the code when rendering a page then the code is never loaded which for large classes is a good thing. The caching of these classes is something I still need to get my head around, and I am not sure if APCu can be used to cache all of the key classes in bitweaver so we just reload from that cache. I'd hit a problem with that caching messing up the array of .js and .css files to be loaded, and while it would be nice to have that content available cached I can see where it is better to simply have the already minimised versions available. I was using copies of things like jQuery from the CDN service, but need to work out who to stop Firefox complaining about cross domain content. Just another thing on the TODO list.

Having now got what I think is a stable build of bitweaver using namespace and autoloading along with Smarty5 I can gt on with a few of the other improvements that the live sites would benefit from before I make the new code live on the main server. Since I am the only person using the admin functions, that some of them still need updating is not such as problem. As long as wiki and blogs ware working for peaople to view the site content that is all that matters short term.

Having had eclipse with PDT going tits up on the Tumbleweed desktop, I was forced to drastic action, and while I still don't like the M$ involvement with it, VSCode is getting easier to use even if it is lacking key feature that I liked in PDT. I'm using the DevsensePHP add-on for validating the PHP code and at least that has a PHP8.4 mode which PDT has yet to be updated to anyway. The current irritation is that all of the Smarty and ADOdb code along with the smaller utilities are flooding the errors list with entries that I would rather simply ignore. I can exclude the files, but then DevsensePHP can't provide the links to the base classes which sort of defeats the objects. Mistral did come up with 'php.exclude.files' but that is not an option on DevsensePHP, perhaps on one of the other extensions, but I think it is something that I need to take up on the right forum when I actually find it. I DID actually stump up money for the paid copy so I should be entitled to support?

So now to check out all of the display functions and I've even started a few little tweaks to the .css to tidy legacy layout niggles, mainly on myhomecloud.uk since that never did get more than a rudimentary styling exercise!


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