PHP oh how you thwart me
Apr 16th, 2007 by Karen
Since moving my weblog to Wordpress 2 years ago, I’ve started to learn PHP in tiny, tiny bits. That endeavor continued when I chose to use Mediawiki for our library blogs. The problem is I know just enough PHP to understand most of what is going on in the code but not enough not to get very frustrated. Today presented me with two key examples of this one a code issue, the second a configuration issue.
- Mediawiki has a database class with many different functions that let you access the database behind Mediawiki. (I’ve written about this before.) The class is documented at http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/phase3/includes/Database.php?view=markup
My problem is that I don’t understand the class, because I don’t have enough formal programming training to look at a function and know how it should be used. I like clear example and with those few and far between most of my understanding of how the functions in this class work is built on trial and error. Unfortunately, this seriously has hampered me when trying to create my own Special Pages in Mediawiki. - I’ve been trying to get Fez (a front-end for the Fedora digital library software) working at my library. Overall the install was a breeze. However, something isn’t working correctly with sessions or how variables are being passed in the community permissions page. So when I go to make changes to the community permissions the program won’t let me. Sigh. All of this likely boils down to a problem with the settings in my PHP.ini file. Yet again, something I don’t know nearly enough about. After hours of digging into the Apache error_log files I was able to discover what the problem was and fix it. I learned something (that there are subconfiguration files for the different PHP extensions) new, but also spent way to much time on this problem.
The real solution to this problem isn’t for me to spend time learning more about PHP. Instead I need hired the right person for my Web Developer 3 position. That way these systems will have someone with significantly more experience than me in this area installing, customizing and looking after them.
