Longing for a break

There’s been this project at work that has been a thorn in my side, all manner of stresses between the project team and contract in Victoria, and myself in WA. To say I’ve been like the meat in the sandwich is an understatement. The developer has produced the site using CodeIgniter, a PHP coding framework with which I am unfamiliar.

When the project first moved to our servers (using IIS6) only then did the developer ask which platform we were on, the project mostly complete at this point. Thanks due to one of our schools a new virtual server was created running Windows Server with WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP). We get the site loaded, errors display. We then find out the CodeIgniter 1.7.1 is not compatible with PHP 5.3 that WAMP installs, so we were forced to downgrade to an older version of WAMP. That fixed the CodeIgniter problems, but still hadn’t solved the include errors we were seeing.

For some reason when WAMP installs it doesn’t turn on a number of services that you’d assume Apache users would want, especially mod_rewrite to support these functions within .htaccess files. Today, after several hours of playing at home I have managed to get this project to run on a Windows machine, it appears that amongst the services not running in PHP was shorthand coding, which the developer has used. I am hopeful now that tomorrow when I am back at work what I have discovered today will install and solve the problems we’ve had.

Now back to my weekend!