Custom Helpers and Scripts
Posted by geetarista February 21, 2008
I have a ridiculous amount of delicious bookmarks–currently 7400. That’s even after cleaning out about 3,000 of them, too. (By the way, notice I didn’t write “del.ico.us”–it’s because they’re changing it with the new version that’s coming out.)
Anyway, most of those bookmarks are just snippets of source code and tutorials that I save. Many of those bookmarks are similar or variations of the same idea, so it makes it difficult for me to know if something is outdated or irrelevant anymore. It’s sad because I’m really not even using this stuff anyway–it’s just sitting there. So what I’m doing is creating my own little framework/library that I can use with the Zend Framework (my choice framework right now). Most MVC frameworks (if not all) have the ability to create your own custom helpers, scripts, and classes. Every time I find some new source code on the tubes, I will try to add to or change my current library so I’m always up to date. Then no matter what framework I’m using (if at all), I have a central repository for all of this code that I find. That way I don’t have to clutter up my bookmarks and I’ll just include a link to the source website in the code.
This is probably something completely obvious to most programmers, but since I still feel like a noob I thought it was a cool idea. This will work not only for PHP but for HTML, JavaScript, et al. as well. The same goes for many of the features available in Eclipse that help to automate tasks and coding that I haven’t used to their full potential. I’m already starting to see the benefits and how much better my programming will be. It’s a daunting task to go back through all this stuff, but it’s definitely worth it.
