More CMS's, this time for PHP

I recently had a requirement for a CMS to run on a Linux server. For 99% of my day-job I use ASP.NET but I am an old hand at PHP and I'm not overly familiar with the syntax of Ruby or Python so PHP was my language of choice.

I was after a small, easy to set up, flexible solution which wasn't going to take ages to install and configure and that also didn't require me to use a massive framework.


I friend recomended Pixie which is a free, open source offering from toggle and I've got to say that I was pleasantly supprised. Admittedly it's a million miles away from the object oriented nature of .NET that I'm so used to but it does have a plugin architecture and is easily skinnable.

I recomend giving it a try!

PHP Search plugin link updated

We just moved offices (Photo's here and here) and as such some of our IP addresses changed.

I've recently had a couple of hits to the "Firefox PHP function search plugin" post. So I updated the link so you can now download it again. Sorry for the slight outage.

Firefox PHP Function search plugin

15/07/2008 : Updated the link to the plugin as we have moved offices. I might try and get a wordpress blog set up instead of this thing.

A while ago I was bored in the office so I decided to have a faff about for twenty minutes making something that might be useful to the folks I work with.

Most of the development work we do here at twentysix Leeds is done in .NET but most of us (everyone apart from the TD) are from a PHP background and while at one point it was my language of preference, the amount of .NET I have learnt recently has forced most of the PHP knowledge out the other ear! and this seems to be the situation for the other lads too. So I thought I'd do something about it and create a search plug-in for Firefox and IE7 that allowed us to search the on-line PHP docs directly from your browser.

So after having read a few articles I wrote the plug-in that is now available from this page, just click the search provider in Firefox (next to the search field) and then click ‘Add “PHP Function Search: By Greg Brant” ' and there you go.

I would apologies to IE users but I'm not going to because it's not my fault that it wont work for you guys. My original intention was that the plug-in would work for Firefox and IE after having read that they both support the OpenSearch format for search providers (Firefox also supports MozSearch plugins too). However; the PHP search only works with GET method forms and IE only supports search providers the use POST.

OK. so, this software (if you can in fact call a search provider software) is provided free of charge with no warranty of any kind what-so-ever! install it at your own risk. All copyrights remain with the owner and all the rest of it.