I typically don’t enjoy the present.  It’s not that I hate it, I just infrequently find it out of the ordinary.  But the curious thing is that I have countless extraordinary memories of the past.  Logic would deduce that non-enjoyable (not necessarily unenjoyable) memories in the present would retain that quality in the past.   It strangely isn’t so.

One year ago, today, I was in Chicago with Sammy visiting our good friend Brandon O’Brien.   It was my 22nd birthday and I wished that it wasn’t.  I don’t usually like to be given extra attention, but I especially didn’t on this particular day.  It was one of those days where the littlest things drive you nuts.  Nonetheless, Sammy and I set out to make something of the day.  We found ourselves at a cold Lake Michigan and Sammy suggested a birthday swim.  I reluctantly got in with the handful of other loonies braving the frigid water.  Not necessarily what I would have chosen to do, but now I can look back on it with fondness.

When something’s supposed to be special, I tend to get too caught up in it being so that I overlook its specialness.   Though I do have tons of wonderful memories that are invitingly summoned to mind, I can’t help but think of how many things I miss or how much greater some of these memories could have been.  This has been added to the list of things that I need to work on.  Good thing I’m still less than a quarter century old.

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These were the ingredients:

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Titles are the biggest deterrent to my blogging. I’ll have an idea and start to run with it until I ask myself what the title might be. I then sigh and get on with my non-digital life. Blogging is like writing in a public diary, who titles their journal page? (If you do, don’t say anything because it nullifies my point.)

There was a period of time where my titles were just the date. I believe I was a more thoughtful blogger back in those days because I wasn’t wasting my energies attempting to summarize my scattered thoughts in 5 words. For a while I would just use the title of whatever song was in my head (typically Simon & Garfunkel). I was really just trying to make people think that I came up with a beautifully poetic phrase that perfectly summarized the content of my post.

All that to say I might do away with titles. But then I would have to blog better and more frequently. We’ll see what comes of this..

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I’ve done web development for quite some time now and I hate writing CRUD as much as the next guy.  As a developer your goal should be to not ever write the same code twice.  But when creating CRUD systems for different projects this is impossible.  You always find yourself doing the same thing, over and over again.  Most coders have been enticed by Ruby on Rails’s “weblog in 15 minutes” screencast.  There are also PHP frameworks that boast the same functionality.  I’ve never had the desire to learn any of these systems and, honestly, EzSQL teamed with Smarty gets the job done quite nicely.

A few years ago I ran across this article and ever since I have been building on the ideas presented to create an extremely powerful PHP Scaffold Class that I have used in numerous production sites.  In it’s simplest implementation, all you do is pass the table name to the class and the scaffolding is created based on the table’s structure.  Over time I’ve added functionality for table relationships, image uploading and resizing, and more.

I imagine this class could be very useful to the PHP community.  I plan on refining it further and eventually making it available to the public.  My purpose in writing this post is to find out if there’s any interest in this sort of thing and to see if, and how much, people would be willing to pay for a license to use it.  Your feedback is welcome in the comments below.

Features

• Parent/Child relationships
• Image uploading and resizing
• Thumbnail generation
• WYSIWYG text fields
• Disable certain actions (show, add, edit, or delete)
• Handles SET or ENUM fields as select boxes
• Sort by any of the columns
• Pagination
• Hide different columns from the listing table or from all views
• Automatic recognition and handling of created and modified date fields
• Extremely flexible

Demo

I’ve setup an example of a simple store backend to show its functionality.  You can view the code and database structure by clicking the links at the top.  Here is an example of a frontend that has been built on top of a backend powered by this class.

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