PHP

As you may have already gathered from my Twitter feed, I've been working recently on ReelCritic, a new blog catering solely for my film reviews. For a sneak peek at the design of the new site, pop on over to http://www.reelcritic.co.uk/. Everything you find at that address is a non-functional mock-up, so please don't try to leave comments, etc. There's only one review available, Rachel Getting Married. I'm currently working to port this design over to Drupal's theme engine so that I can get the blog fully up and running.

My new favourite resource for development-related questions, StackOverflow.com, already provides a number of answers to this. However, I'm interested to hear from you, my small community of readers, what IDE you use for PHP development, and why you like it.

One of the things I do with my blog is to review stuff that I've bought or seen or read or listened to. As a result, I wanted to be able to rate this stuff as a concise summary of my view of it.

There are a couple of Drupal modules available that could help me out with this, such as review, bookreview and moviereview, but these are all in various stages of death, and I didn't necessarily want all the extra, sometimes stuff-specific, functionality of those modules, so I sat down last night and wrote myself a little filter module that nicely converts ratings of the form [x/y] to stars. It handles half stars and everything.

The following implementation is a very simple one: it deliberately doesn't expose any settings to the administrator or the user. As such, the default out-of-the-box behaviour is all that is available. No, you can't customise or change the images. No, you can't customise the ratings input formats (e.g., using percentages). No, you can't do anything but replace the [x/y] with x whole stars and y-x empty stars. However, it's a pretty good introduction to developing for Drupal, so here goes.