New Invenzzia.org

eXtreme — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 17:20:00 +0100

One month ago we had no time to prepare a good website for our group so Zyx made something temporary. Today I present a better and more complex solution. The website has been updated with texts and articles about our team. We've got still a lot to do with organization but our website and devblog are almost finished.

I installed and configured dotClear2 from scratch. Now, there is no problem with mixed Polish and English entries because I set up two independent miniblogs on one installation. User language detection is now integrated to the website's system and it is based on cookies and browser settings. I made also nicer and more friendly theme.

And why not Wordpress? I don't like it. There are no real and friendly templates (yes, I love sweet chaos with mixed PHP and HTML). So far, I had an unpleasant opportunity to create from scratch a template for Wordpress and it was a terrible experience. I have been working with dotClear2 earlier and it is very easy to configure everything and convert default theme to website's design. Moreover, it is a nice piece of OOP code in PHP5. ;-)

Team Invenzzia hasn't got the official logo yet. This one on website is only a temporary solution.

Let's go!

Zyx — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 12:29:00 +0100

Welcome to the devblog of the new programming group Invenzzia. The reason that I formed them are my open-source projects which need a good organization and infrastructure. To begin with, the group will take care of my advanced template engine that exists for over three years so far - Open Power Template. It will become the first part of a bigger series "Open Power Libraries". Currently, we have already begun setting up everything and our website is run part by part. I'll do everything to make sure it won't last too long.

As a typical English-language user you haven't probably heard about Open Power Board project. It was a Polish initiative started in the end of 2004 as a result of commercializing Invision Power Board. The goal was to create an open-source discussion board by the Polish PHP community. However, the project was closed after a couple of weeks, because almost everyone said they have no time to develop it. In fact, the only people who were still active were me with Open Power Template and Tomasz "Slump" Szczupliński as a manager. I tried to reactivate the project in 2005, but there was the same story: everyone except Slump and me went away. I gave up and decided to create more open-source libraries, using the infrastructure left by OpenPB. I managed to make the first stable release of OPT and started Open Power Forms, a library for data validation and form processing integrated with OPT. The code is still marked as beta, because I did not have anyone to finish the JavaScript part, although the PHP-side solutions proved their effectiveness many times.

Of course the situation could not last forever. Two months ago I decided to close OpenPB definietly and throw away almost everything that had any connections with that project. The idea of a new programming group came to my mind and I asked some people whether they would like to participate in it. The team is formed by:

Jacek "eXtreme" Jędrzejewski - PHP/JS programmer and XHTML/CSS hacker. Personally, he's my brother.
Radosław "Radzio" Piekarz - PHP/JS programmer. Personally, we study together.
Tomasz "Slump" Szczupliński - our manager mentioned above.
Tomasz "Zyx" Jędrzejewski - or in other words - me. I code libraries and everything that speeds up other software.

In the beginning, we are going to finish Open Power Template 2, as well as Open Power Forms. We have some more ideas, but they will be coded later. Anyway, we'll try to provide a great set of open-source tools for PHP that present a completely new point of view to many issues.

Invenzzia... in English - website

New Invenzzia.org

Let's go!