Re: [PHP] PHP Manual problems

Ashley Sheridan wrote:
> I've not had any personal experience with the public sector, but I have
> heard stories from those who have. By all accounts, it seems that most
> of the public sector is still stuck in the dark ages with regards to
> technology, which could go some way to explaining the abysmal failure
> rate of public sector projects! Open source in this sector would be a
> perfect solution in most cases, but it's shunned because of fear of the
> unknown and worry that anything free is worth the money paid for it.

I'm doing quite a bit more work in public sector these days. Recently ne 
department finally did away with IE6 and moved to IE7. Here's what I had 
to do to accomodate this gotcha:

     Nothing

See, that was tough. Why was it so hard? Because I developed for 
Firefox/Opera and touched up for IE6, 7, 8 since these are inevitable 
paths of evolution in the public sector.

Open source presents several problems for Government; however, many of 
these issues are being addressed. It's just that the wheels of 
bureaucracy move slowly --Patience wins the day. Some of these issues 
are licensing schemes. The Government has difficulty with licenses such 
as the GPL due to their viral nature. Additionally, due to the MS 
stranglehold on so much of industry... most of the skillset within 
Government leans heavily towards Microsoft products and systems. Then 
there's the FUD that's been injected into society over the years 
purporting Linux to be inferior. Now just to offer some info on what 
I've had the joy (sorrow sometimes :) of encountering/recommending so 
far within various scenarios (Government, Councils, Task Forces, etc):

PHP :)
MySQL
Mediawiki
Drupal
Joomla
osCommerce
Ubercart
Moodle
Feng Office (formerly OpenGoo)
Debian
InterJinn (mostly used for gluing applications together these days)

There's a world of customization out there, being able to jump into any 
codebase and start creating modules, extensions, skins, or outright 
modify the core (when necessary) is an extreme plus. It also helps to 
have security clearance :) Within these scenarios, browsers are usually 
Internet Explorer or Firefox. IE is the predominant choice, but in some 
cases users have been able to push for Firefox.

Cheers,
Rob.
-- 
http://www.interjinn.com
Application and Templating Framework for PHP