Prepping for diploma project

I do not mention programming courses (that I attend on Saturdays) often. Mostly because I became not too excited about them after first year. A little unfitting and Microsoft-centric choice of subjects for my taste.

Anyway since it did scratch on PHP at the very end I picked finishing my Deny Spam WordPress plugin (not publicly available) for diploma project. Now is really time to kick myself and do it, so list-like post on my workflow for it and maybe place for your suggestions.

WordPress docs

There is wealth of information on WordPress around. It takes some time and insight to understand how bulk of it sucks in misguided poorly researched way and trying to score easy traffic.

I’ve been cutting down on WordPress feeds lately, here are my core references for now:

• WordPress Codex, official documentation is lacking in details, but vast and more or less systematic;
• Digging into WordPress – some of the most thorough and deep posts on topic; also Samer made me a thank you gift for optimizing blog in form of their book, which I am now reading;
• Scribu – not very prolific blog, but some excellent plugins and info; I am especially interested in making use of scbFramework for my plugin.

PHP development

Nothing really new in this department:

• MoWeS – web server stack;
• NetBeans for PHP – IDE;
• PHPXref – for inline documentation;

Bureaucracy parts

Naturally I will have to produce considerable amount of paper junk. It’s been a while (I manage to doge most of paperwork at work). I also want it to be easily shared with supervisor so there are no last minute hiccups as usual.

• going with OpenOffice for most of text;
• Dia for some flowcharts;
• or giving Google Docs a spin again, they had announced some cool stuff today.

Incidents-proofing

Naturally all this work must be proofed against curse of losing it last day:

• Cobian Backup had been recently updated to new major version;
• Dropbox is even more awesome than usual with recent increase of space bonus from referrals, go subscribe with my link if you hadn’t already. :) By the way if you use Dropbox already please go vote for LAN sync suggestion.

Results presentation

Now this part is going to be tricky. How exactly do you show anti-spam plugin working? It is slow, boring and statistical. I do not know how much of time I will need to fill (supposedly not much).

Thinking about making some nice infographic. Except that I have no clue on how to. Any suggestions?

Overall

Research, code, document and get rid of… blazingly. :)

Anything I forgot? Any awesome resource or tool that can come of use?