Alex Tech Adventures The webs best tutorials!

I am Alexander Romanenko, a beginner programmer who is trying to convert a hobby into a career (without much success so far ^_^). This blog will contain my entries of everything tech related in my life that I find important enough to post as well as a portal for my Zend Framework viewers to ask questions, get tutorial code and make requests. Hope you enjoy your stay!

Here’s some history if you care:

This is a re-designed version of my original blog hosted on a Premium account with a whole new look and feel. The idea to have a tech blog originally started from the fact that when I do something complex and/or unique I can never remember how I did it the second time if I need to repeat it or share the experience with others. So I started a proper blog coupled with twitter to keep things organized.

Then I got an idea to create video tutorials for Zend Framework. I was dissatisfied with the state of educational material for ZF especially for beginners. The idea of creating videos was inspired by a video blog From The Couch. Videos were posted on YouTube. After a couple of weeks the videos really took off generating about 10000 views in a single month. Then request and questions started to appear. Managing requests and code issues on tutorials broken into numerous 10 minute peaces became a hassle. There was a need for more central information exchange and without having to spread one tutorial over 5 peaces. The next logical idea was to move everything here but a few things had to be changed to provide the service.

First up all the videos were migrated to blip.tv as they are wonderful enough to provide the videos in their original format, resolution and length. That’s just awesome. Then I had to change my theme. No hard feelings for HashOne Obox guys but it was too buggy and the look did not really fit. Their subsequent premium themes, which I am sure would work with no bugs, did not fit the content very well either so I had to look elsewhere and came across http://themeforest.net/item/sleekslide-portfolio-4-in-1/26824 . I really liked it and I implemented it without too much extra thought. One thing I did change is to make header tabs to display categories instead of pages:

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$categories = wp_list_categories(array("echo"=>0));
$categories = str_replace('<li class="categories">Categories<ul>', '', $categories);
$categories = str_replace('</ul></li>','',$categories);
echo $categories; 

However, about two months into administrating the site both WordPress and SleekTabs started to show their limitations. Although SleekTabs looks nice, its AJAX interface interfeers a lot with navigation while the content column was too narrow. Unfortunately the theme is not very customizable to resolve either of those issues. Furthermore, with the increased number of feedback and post unrelated questions I needed a forum so that not only can I organize feedback better but so that viewers can help each other in times when I am not able to answer the question. I was beginning to push wordpress to its limits and its simplistic management became increasingly frustrating with more advanced content.

Fortunately, I met a wonderful person and developer Panagiotis Kosmidis from WebCreation GR interactive web solutions who suggested to move to Joomla. At first i was reluctant because I felt using a full CMS is an overkill for what I am doing and yet another major transition into a complex system, I am not familiar with, is going to take lots of time. Luckly, he volunteered to take care of both new joomla template expenses and building a full custom site for me based on Joomla CMS and Kunena forums. The new setup proved to be much more robust, stable and comfortable. Not only is Joomla much more comfortable to use, but Panagiotis took the time to fully customize the theme and Joomla backend to suit my exact needs. The end result was awesome as I could now work more eficiently and have my site look more professional. This is one of the best donations I could receive. Thank you.