You all gave us great questions for our ASK JOHN feature.
Mootools vs. Jquery
What were the reasons (benefits) for choosing Mootools over JQuery?
At this point, it’s not reasonable to switch to JQuery as the switch would require significant code rewrites for ourselves and also for third-party developers. The choice between using Mootools and Jquery were based around our goal of creating a platform that could be highly customized by anyone with access to the direct code yet easy to use right out of the box. There is a debate that jQuery is more designer-friendly and MooTools is more programmer-friendly. Obviously our choice was MooTools. If you’d like to learn, check out their in-depth documentation.
Server-Side PHP debugging
How do you approach server-side php debugging?
I generally just use var_dump() >.> but I have used xdebug with netbeans before.
Here are some helpful instructions on how to install xdebug with netbeans:
http://netbeans.org/kb/docs/php/debugging.html
File Permissions
My host has refused to set folders/files with 777 permission- what should I do?
Basically, if apache is running as the same user as their ssh/ftp client (ideal) then you can set the permissions to 777. Otherwise, the files and folders need to be writable as apache, which is why they should be set to 755/644 . Matt has written an excellent
article on tips to selecting a server.
That’s all for now! As mentioned before, we plan to run this feature every few weeks, so post any questions you have below, and we’ll select some to ask John. Don’t be shy about letting us know if this is too technical, not technical enough, or exactly what you’d hoped for!
