2. While your both of our ways work fine, this person likes to start a loop, and then in the executable part, END the PHP, type in lines of HTML (including starting/stopping the PHP within those HTML lines to pipe out a variable), and then START the PHP again, putting in the brackets to contain it all. And of course it’s not properly whitespaced at all.

3. With variable names I tend to do what java programmers do, personally that variable for me would have been called prodID or something akin to it. It’s just that this database he built and all his damn variable names are like that, so I’ll be cruising along and have to hit shift a good 2 times more per variable name, especially with the underscores which I have to actually remove my right hand to hit (maybe I’ll work on that).

4. There are a million and seven ways to reduce redundancy simply by smart querying, joins, relational tables, etc. In my opinion, at least, scalable projects use very far-reaching queries in very streamlined databases.

5. I didn’t mean that I wanted multiple files for everything. I always make up function files and connection files and stuff to include here and there, but the project I’m doing now is like taking wordpress’ files for creating a new post, editing old posts, managing oomments on posts, and any other function that could be related to posts — and throwing them all together. If it was coded efficiently, I’d have no problems. But the includes are nonexistent and (again) often a lot of the code is totally redundant across the modes the php can be put into, and really, it’s just a personal preference but I like having short files that I don’t have to hunt through to find errors in other areas of that file’s functionality.

That’s all =) Thanks for the input Danny I feel cool having 7 comments on a post.

Look at this mess I get to redesign:
http://www.engr.psu.edu/international/

My favorite part is the hideous flash menu.

Anyway, I agree with the parts of this post I understand (aka the white space part). My favorite part of the post, though, was Danny’s excessive amount of commenting.

Also, California was awesome for me, hope you’re loving it too!

But I guess I’m not really a software developer.

Wah. Wah.

, I think that my way works out pretty understandably. The main reason I do it this way is because I ADORE syntax highlighting and my echo statements don’t get highlighted as HTML…

3. Variable names are something that everyone disagrees on. I wouldn’t be able to STAND your code if you don’t distinguish words by either capitalization or underscoring ( prodid doesn’t click as naturally for me as ProdID or prod_id — I even sometimes like Prod_ID.. but I wish I didn’t because that’s a pain in the ass…). I think the important thing is for consistency throughout the program. As long as all variable names are done with the same formatting, it shouldn’t be too terribly difficult to adjust to the style when you change projects…

4. I haven’t taken a database design course (yet! next spring I finally get to fit it into my schedule, hopefully), so I don’t understand every single in and out.. but with all my THON work, I’ve picked up on a pretty good deal of DB design techniques. Redundancy can be really obnoxious a lot of the time, but it can also be handy in certain situations. In my work project, I had a universal field in every one of the tables so that I could avoid making double the queries…

5. That is so 1998.

6. I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about multiple files… If there is a logical way to separate different things, I say go for it absolutely… however, if you’re putting every 20-line function into it’s own file, that can get to be a BUNCH of files you’re looking at. The way that I’ve been doing is having one GlobalFunctions.php which contains functions which are used on several different pages. So each of my pages are much less code because they just call functions in this massive GlobalFunctions file… with good use of whitespace in between functions and similar naming techniques, the GlobalFunctions file becomes a tamable beast.

::Whew:: sorry about that… I just thought you brought up some great points which definitely merited discussion.. Keep up the awesome blogging!!!!

(Video notes:

When the camera cut to you while driving, I totally thought you were going to pull a Nalts!

I can’t believe you know the entire “Still Alive” song… that’s hella nerdy. )

It is so incredibly true that no two programmers are alike and that you must plan accordingly because of that.

1. Whitespace is an absolute MUST. Anything that is nested should get another tab indentation (at the very minimum, 2-4 spaces) and lately I’ve even been including whitespace inside my lines because it’s even easier for me to read. Ex:

echo ( function_call ( param1 , param2 ) );

I don’t know how you feel about that, but it really makes my life easier…

2. I’m not sure how I feel about that use of echoes. I most certainly separate the majority of my PHP and HTML (putting all the MySQL queries up at the top (or in an external function) and organize everything accordingly), but if I’m looping through a 2-D array (let’s say first name, last name) and printing the stuff out into a table, I end the PHP section after the loop structure, put regular HTML (with echoes) there, and start the PHP back up to end the loop structure. With my “proper” indenting and my typical comment on the end of the php (

Thanks for posting this!