Jevontech

PHP

Introduction

I have been using PHP since the year 2000 , but the last couple of years I haven't really done much with PHP. 

PHP script archive

A long long time ago (2001) I wrote a number of PHP scripts. They are really outdated, as they were made for PHP 4 , but if you are still interested, take a look on the sourceforge website: http://sourceforge.net/projects/jevonweb/files

Later on I also write the "famous" PHPenpals script, which enables people to start their own penpals website.
I guess this is also quite outdated, but it can be found at http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpenpals/files/

PHP CMS systems

Over the years I have tried and used quite a number of CMS systems. I started a long time ago with PHPcms, which used plain text files for the content, so it was actually more of a template engine then a CMS. Later on I switched to Joomla, which I have used as the CMS for this website for several years. I also did some experiments with Drupal. In 2012 I wanted to update Jevontech.com and I wanted to update the CMS as well. After checking out the state-of-the-art in PHP CMS systems, I decided to go for PIMcore. 

PIMcore

I developed this website on the PIMcore CMS.

For me the most important features were:

  • based on the Zend framework and has clean and logical structuring of code, which enables me to add my own code to the system
  • nice backend that allows quick inserting and adding of new pages to the website.
  • SEO friendly URL's and caching are supported out of the box

Drawbacks:

  • Fairly steep learning curve if you are not familiar with PHP and the Zend Framework
  • Documentation is a bit scarce
  • No big community yet, so you will have to figure out quite a few things by yourself

Piwik: the alternative to Google Analytics

If you are looking for an alternative for Google Analytics, check out Piwik. It is a open source PHP based web analytics engine.
Installation is quite straight forward:

  1. Download and install the PHP script somewhere on your webserver (you do need a MySQL database)
  2. Include a small piece of code on every page of your website to track visitors and you're up and running !

Once you log in to your Piwik installation, you will be able to see much of the same data as in Google Analytics and it looks quite nice as well.