Alternative Birthday, a view of your own mortality

Found this on Download Squad earlier today.
It's a little script that calculates mile stones in your life based on seconds, minutes, hours, days and weeks elapsed. So if you'd like to take a slightly different view at your mortality this does.

For example did you know you are pretty lucky to see 30,000 weeks?

[Time and Date birthday calculator via DownloadSquad]

CMS Software and me... Speed Dating

I love trying out new technology. When a customer of mine contacted me to see if I could help them revamp their web infrastructure I was somewhat giddy. I had originally developed their webpage etc 3 years ago based on Joomla 1.0. I never really liked Joomla's backend and my customer wasn't the biggest fan either.

Joomla 1.5 promised to fix some concerns but low and behold: Templates developed for 1.0 were not compatible with 1.5. I had a hard time believing this as it borders on idiocy to throw out backward compatibility for no real reason. I would soon find out that this practice wasn't just Joomla's but was surprisingly common in the CMS field. It's almost as if the developers feel a need to artificially create work for web designers.

The result of this: We were no longer married to Joomla. If I was going to have to redo the template/theme to work with Joomla 1.5 I might as well shop around if there is a setup that my customer and I liked better.

I quickly scoured Google for some other options and selected Drupal, ModX and Silverstripe for testing.

I had worked with Drupal in the past and it had always reminded me of a quote I had heard about Git. It seemed like it was specifically designed to make people feel dumber than they actually are. 

Over four days I spend researching what CMS my customer would like the most I installed Drupal, ModX and Silverstrip on a test server and actually ported the design and a fair amount of site content to each of them for comparison. My personal favorite did emerge rather quickly and to my surprise it was Drupal. My customers had someone check out each backend and again somehow Drupal managed to win that one too.

It is a learning curve on both ends the content development and the design of a theme but it really does seem worth it after that. I'm somewhat curious if Drupal7 will break reverse compatibility, if it does I guess it means more work for me. That type of work is just not enjoyable rather than creating I'm doing busy work.

Software Mentioned:

• Joomla - http://www.joomla.org
• Drupal - http://www.drupal.org
• ModX - http://www.modxcms.org
• Silverstripe - http://www.silverstripe.org