Just a small note to highlight a good reason to upgrade to the latest Oxygen Author (13.2), recently released: they now support “Find/Replace in Files” over FTP and WebDAV.

If you’re working on DITA projects in a corporate environment, chances are that your source files will be on a server somewhere - in my case, in an Alfresco CMS. As Alfresco offers a neat FTP and WebDAV interface, we can edit DITA content directly in the CMS from Oxygen… and now we can even do global find/replaces on all files in a DITA Map - directly on Alfresco.

It already allowed me to find a nasty broken <xref> in a 600-topic reference guide. Hurray for Oxygen 13.2!

A while ago I posted about my potential dive into the wonderful world of .Net development for the web, using C# and the MVC framework for ASP.net.

Since then I’ve been pretty quiet… the reason, at least in part, being that I was busy learning how to write C# code, how to deal with Visual Studio, and how the whole MVC thing worked. All in all, it is pretty similar to the Django framework for Python, so I had at least some idea of how to work with Views, Controllers and Models.

By now, my first website built on MVC is live - yay! There is not too much content there yet, but at least my whole framework is functional and has not failed me yet. I used Entity framework to generate models (database-first development) for my controllers to deal with. The site itself is pretty standard HTML5 with a couple of neat partial views. And of course it is completely localized into 6 languages… Cool!

Next up: building a Single Page Application for the admin side of my web application… Upshot, Knockout, and other mysterious Javascript libraries, here I come…

Been on vacation for a while, in East Sussex, around Rye. Loveliness all around, including weather-wise, however unlikely that may sound.

Back to business now. Wireframes to be made, C# to be studied.

And all the while, reading Patrick Rothfuss’ excellent Kingkiller Chronicle!

At the Day Job, I’m kind of coming to the point where I am coding things that are so vital to the company, and crucial to production, that it is becoming irresponsible to continue doing so in my beloved Python.

The thing is, while Python is pretty powerful, elegant and easy to learn and read, I’m more or less the only person in the company who knows anything about it. All of IT department’s developments are .Net-based, and our software R&D department is all Java and C++.

So I guess I will either need to dive into C# and MVC for web apps, or give up the coding and find someone else to do it for me… but given the fact that I started coding because we were short on resources from the beginning, I’m now installing the Microsoft Web Platform… Let’s hope the learning curve is not too steep!

For a (hopefully) upcoming web project, I’m refreshing my knowledge on the latest web CMS frameworks. I used Drupal in the past, and before that, Wordpress (but only for blogs). Recently I’ve become a bit of a hardcore Pythonista, so my fingers are itching to go with Django.

Drupal, of course, has changed a lot in the past few years. Still, even in the completely revamped interface of Drupal 7, I still feel it is kind of heavy for the occasional user - and as my client is likely to want to do their own updates, but only once every few weeks or so, this is a concern.

Wordpress has the easiest admin interface that I know of. It has only gotten more polished since the days when I first used it, and with Wordpress 3 and its custom post types, combined with one of the many free HTML5-based theme frameworks, it looks like most serious sites could actually be built with Wordpress. Creating new posts is a breeze in Wordpress, so this would be big bonus for the client.

With Django, I feel the sky is the limit. Because I know Python to a degree that far outstrips my fledgling PHP skills, I’m confident I could build any required customizations in Django. The only problem, of course, is that I have never used it and I’m on quite a tight timeline… Mostly deploying to their hosted server is something that might prove to be a bit much for me.

Ah, l’embarras du choix… Wordpress has my favor right at this moment, but I’m sure I’ll change my mind once or twice more in the coming days, while I work on my proposal.