MaW’s Blog

Looks like the Westlands Tower site has another problem with the forum posting system under certain rare circumstances. Evidently a previous fix I developed and applied wasn’t comprehensive enough, so now I’ve got to do it again for another set of code. This is really starting to show up a lot of structural problems with the site when it comes to maintenance, and now I see reasons behind a lot of the seemingly obscure things my former boss does.

However, I’m working on another site which is structured in a completely different way, and so far it’s working very nicely indeed. This will probably provide the pattern for a rework of Westlands to make it both more maintainable and slightly less… how shall I put this? Oh yes, sieve-like.

Thanks to x3ja for lending me his O’Reilly XSLT book. The key thing is, think of it as a functional language, not an imperative one - variable assignment is impossible, as it’s a side-effect and you can’t have those! Simple really. Example inside…
(more…)