I am not going to do a ‘Roundup’ because I am not going to review every single one of them. I am not going to even list features, nor am I going to show what each one supports. All I want to do is put together a nice LIST of all the PHP based CMSs out there…so please, if I missed one that you know of…leave a comment for me.

Here is your list, in no particular order other than by maybe popularity and my personal preference. It can be argued between Joomla, WordPress and Drupal about which is in the lead….but either way…here they are:

I will be adding to this, if/when someone suggests another one because I know there are hundreds of them out there. So keep this bookmarked!

We used a very nice set of controls for this project in Telerik. They are by far my favorite set of proprietary controls for the .NET Framework. The project was heavily built around these controls so it was only natural to want to keep with them. One problem…98% of the charts had to be Logarithmic. If you are not familiar with this…its when a charts Y Axis is equally spaced with labels dramatically increased (1, 10, 100, 1000, so on) instead of your normal Linear charting (1, 2, 3, 4, etc).

This presented a problem because the Telerik RadChart did not represent the logarithmic minor ticks and lines properly. They didn’t increase and scale the way they were suppose to. It’s hard to explain in words, so here is a screenshot:

The image above still shows a Linear scale even though it’s actually Logarithmic. Well, I searched all over the internet to see if this was just a bug in the Telerik RadChart control or if I was just doing something wrong. Turns out, Telerik knows (recently) about this issue and it has been logged. I added a reply to that thread (in the link) asking if there was any update on the issue…and as you can read there…they said they were not going to fix this. They did offer a workaround though…and here is a screenshot:

What they said to do was just remove the Minor Grid Lines and Ticks from the chart. Well, I had already done that as a temporary fix, but if you know anything about the oil and gas industry then you know how sensitive and important the data is. So, when we are charting their data it is very important to be as precise as possible. The minor grid lines were very important. (BTW, this is just test data in the images, so don’t worry about any issues about showing the clients stuff).

I did some more digging and searching because I really didn’t want to spend too much more time and/or money on this Charting need. I was very lucky too. I came across Microsoft’s latest Charting Controls (add-on to Visual Studio 2008). What’s even better is that as of VS 2010 and .NET Framework 4 it will be already incorporated so there won’t be any installation needed. It did take me about a day to configure, get the data bound to it, make it pretty, etc…but this was the solution I ended up using. And, it turned out to be a lot better…and much more visually appealing. Here is the final:

My only other option would have been some Flash solution or Silverlight. And if you know me very well, you know that I HATE Flash and/or Silverlight. This is one time I can say Hurray for Microsoft this time.

I’ve also taken out the Categories list below, and switched it to something I am toying with. I am mixing the newsvine site with my site, creating an always updated area for Texas Tech. I’ll eventually move this to my Texas Tech link, but for now this is a good way to test for future reuse. Just take a look below and you’ll see a list of items that you’ll see on the Texas Tech Newsvine site.

With that, you usually want to find a nice editor that has the features you want and makes things as simple as possible to complete your task. Here’s a list of some very nice Text Editors for the PC:

Notepad++ (my editor of choice at the moment)
Intype
Crimson Editor
HTML Kit
Aptana
Notepad2
E Text Editor (they say will rival TextMate for the Mac, but I can’t justify paying for one when there are soooo many good ones out there that are FREE)
UltraEdit (again, why pay?)

The main reason I even started this article was because I was getting tired of the simple white backgrounds. Yeah, you can go in and change colors through some of the options, but it’s just not right. You can’t ever get the color scheme correct. So, I did a quick search for a nice theme for one of these editors…and since I already use Notepad++ as my primary Text Editor for my PC at home…I downloaded and installed Port of Ruby Blue theme. And let me tell you, this is one nice theme and it’s very easy on the eyes!!! I highly recommend this theme if you don’t want to spend endless hours trying to get your own theme complete.

Here are a couple I’ve used for the Mac:
Coda
TextMate
Bluefish

These two are kind of different in they are the WYSIWYG editor:
Amaya
Nvu (pronounced N-view)

And this is a nice little Suite of Products with both free Text Editor and WYSIWYG Editor: Trellian, Trellian WebPage, Trellian CodePad. They have a ton of other cool products too…go check them out!

So, getting started sounds easy…now you need to know how to set up, create a project…import this into your favorite IDE (Eclipse), and code away. They even give you a few samples (what they call the Kitchen Sink) to get started with and get use to before you start building your own apps.

There’s a lot more info on the site…so go check it out if you are interested in building great AJAX style web application using pure JAVA code that is compiled into valid JavaScript and HTML pages for final deployment.