An installer script is coming soon, but for now, you should have some working knowledge of CodeIgniter and PHP to go through all the files and edit what needs to be edited (It’s all marked). Feel free to email me through the contact form on my website if you have any questions, comments, or ideas for improvement!

So, It’s been about a month since I popped the question (she said yes obviously), and we’ve actually been planning pretty much non-stop for the past month. We’ve got a date set, a place for the ceremony and reception already booked, DJ, flowers, and everything in the works, and yadda yadda yadda. Kim and her Mom have been taking care of a lot of the details, but luckily, I’ve been given the task of making a web site for our Wedding.

I’ve got a bunch of stuff already written up, the site is in beta right now, it’s got its own domain name, and I’m writing the CMS from scratch using the CodeIgniter framework, like I used for tomduff.net and phlarg.net. I’m having a blast with it.

I recently wrote an RSVP system that’l knock my guest’s socks off. It’s got a MySQL backend, and I’ve even built in a section of the website called CENTCOM, or Wedding Central Command, where Kim and I can manage names, addresses, and RSVP statuses of guests. The whole thing is really neat.

I’m also using the opportunity to avail myself of version control for this project, forgoing my usual SF.net-powered SVN repository, for a more distributed model, using Mercurial and bitbucket.org. It’s been working out GREAT so far. What I’m doing is keeping a working copy at work and home, and committing my changes back up to bitbucket.org. Then, when I get a working trunk, I pull it down to my web server using Hg as well. Pretty neat.

So anyway, that’s what’s going on recently.

In addition to the Nessus Scanner, I’ve got a few new automation projects coming down the pipes, as well as some more site modifications such as a tag cloud and other nice stuff. Stay tuned.

This site (www.tomduff.net) used to be run by a shoddy, horribly hacked together CMS that I wrote when I was first starting out with PHP. Instead of looking into a framework to ease my work, I chose to build on top of the code I had. In hindsight, I suppose this helped me figure out the intricacies of the language, and somewhat good practices, but for such a large project, if you keep building on top of what you’ve got, you tend to pigeonhole yourself at one point or another, and wind up hitting a wall for new features.

I think this whole thing started when I began looking into Ruby on Rails to fix the issues I had, but what I really needed was the cleanliness an MVC framework could give me, while at the same time, allowing me to use a language I already knew. Ruby isn’t that hard to learn, but I use PHP more, so I was better off with an MVC framework written in, and for, PHP.