musclecoder fucked around with this message at 16:47 on Oct 26, 2009

musclecoder fucked around with this message at 17:10 on Oct 26, 2009

1. Still PHP4 based. I hate seeing var's littered everywhere, no __construct()'s, and no public/private keywords.
   
   
2. Templates are fundamentally wrong. The templates call the specific method in each module (basically a controller) instead of the other way around. Thus, if you want to build a template incrementally, or slice up a HTML page into small sub-templates, its very hard. {exp:module:method_name var1="value1" var2="value2"}{/exp:module:method_name} seems like a pretty backwards way to call a specific method of a class.
   
   
3. They defeat the entire purpose of templates by forcing you to repeat templated HTML/CSS. For example, you want the same header HTML on each page of your site? Each new template needs that code repeated (unless you had a {exp:module:method_name} call to return that HTML, but thats a pain too).
   
   
4. I dislike programs that try to re-invent the PHP-as-a-templating-language wheel. PHP already handles this beautifully and fastly:
   

   php:

   <?php foreach ( $list as $item ): ?>
      <div class="some_class"><?php echo $item->getName(); ?></div>
   <?php endforeach; ?>
   

   Looks great to me, and is much, much better than some Smarty knockoff or however people like to re-implement that in their code. Seeing {if} {/if} blocks is annoying and slow. Why have the overhead of parsing all of that when PHP will do all of that for you already, natively? See http://php.net/alternative_syntax if you're not already familiar with this, but I love it. It's expressive, fast, and just feels right.
   
   
5. If you're going to write your own database, wrapper, fine, but who would ever have a SELECT query return all of the records to an internal array in the class? What if the query returned thousands of rows, now you have to store all of that in memory! That's ridiculous, use a PHP5 iterator (see my blog post - http://leftnode.com/blog/2009/09/php5-database-iterators/ about using database iterators, its so much faster and easier than reading every row into memory).
   
   
6. The formatting of the code is absolutely horrible. They should be embarrassed to release that code as professional software. I'm a stickler for formatting (I don't care about what formatting method you choose, just be consistent), and their's looks like your typical lovely PHP code just thrown together. Sometimes its spaces, sometimes its tabs, sometimes there's whitespace randomly at the end of a line, sometimes {'s are on the same line, sometimes on the next line. Very little meaningful commenting. I think the way you format your code says a lot about you as a programmer, and the formatting of their code doesn't say much.