When we start projects, we often follow the naming conventions of our frameworks without even thinking about the "Why?" It almost seems silly to ask until you run into a - hopefully, legacy - codebase that has an incomplete or inconsistent scheme.

Unfortunately, web2project is one of those codebases.

For those just joining us, we forked web2project in late 2007 from dotproject which itself was started in mid 2000. Therefore some of the code goes back nearly 13 years all the way back into the PHP 3 days. Therefore, there's a little.. cruft. And naming conventions are just one piece.

First, we've had a simple Object Relational Mapper (ORM) since the earliest days. It handles our object to database (and back) conversion with no configuration. While there are many arguments for and against ORMs, it works and makes things simple.

As of Sunday, January 9th, the first version of the Risk Management Module is available for Web2project. While I'd love to be able to describe all the changes, the conversion process covered so many aspects, it's hard to list them all. The most important ones are:

Recently, I realized that despite talking about Karl Fogel's book - "Producing Open Source Software" - numerous times over the past year[1][2][3], I've never written a review of it. So without further ado, here we go.

I originally picked up my copy in mid-2007. It took me a couple months to get to it, but once I did, it rocked my professional world. To be clear, Karl Fogel is an early (founding?) member of the Subversion Version Control System.

Since the v1.2 release in early December, it's been a bit of an adventure... in the first week after the release, we got a couple major bug reports. Another few days resulted in a few more. Another day, another bug. In the first two weeks, we received a total of 7 bugs that ranked from major to critical. All in all, it was a bad time. Conveniently enough, none of the bugs were particularly complicated or deep, so we were able to quickly resolve each of them and eventually release a v1.2.1. And after receiving word of a small issue requiring another merge, v1.2.2 shortly after the New Year.

While a few members of our community were understandably upset, I was impressed that the bugs were found so quickly and resolves just as quickly. I couldn't put words to this well until I read Karl Fogel's post "Bug Growth is Proportional to User Growth, and Bugs are not Technical Debt." Wow, that Karl is a smart guy. More on that topic later.

For v1.3 we have quite a few features and fixes on the way:

In the last few months or so, it appears the PHP Community has finally found the Joel Test.  Lorna Jane spoke about it last month at PHPNW 09 and this week Brandon Savage adapted it for web development.  While I'd love to point out the fact that I've been writing about the Joel Test for years and even have the "Joel On Software" book on the required reading list for Blue Parabola staff... but I digress...

While all the rules are important in some way, there's one we've taken to heart recently within web2project:

Can you make a shippable version of your software in one step?

Previously, to make a release, we had to:

It's been a while since the last update, so I thought I should let everyone know what's going on towards the v1.2 release (eta December '09).  As of this week, we're approximately halfway there.