Saying Joomla development is a trivial task would be a lie. You'll agree to that as soon as you recognize Joomla as a huge PHP Application Framework. And it of course always takes some time to get used to a framework like that. Incidentally that's the situation for all frameworks of this kind, whether it's Drupal, the Zend Framework or whatever software you like. So it's not just a Joomla property and no reason to choose another framework at all.

Pattern matching using "*" and "?" wildcards is the common approach under Windows when it comes to comparing paths. Many applications - lead by DOS, cmd.exe and explorer.exe (the Windows Explorer) - allow users to use wildcards in paths. Users thereby are enabled to select a group of files matching specific criteria, which is often used in the "open document" dialog of Windows applications.

Matching a string agains a pattern is a very simple thing if you've got a framework or interpreted high level language like PHP or C# (or any of the .NET Framework languages). Those languages already provide classes or functions for using Regular Expressions (RegEx) and thus allow for very complex string comparison, string matching and string replacement features out of the box.

The same topic can become rather complicated when you're (for what reason ever) are limited to pure C and don't want or just can't include complex classes. As I had the same problem and luckily solved it, I decided to provide you the surprisingly very simple C code for matching a string against a pattern containing wildcard if you like.

Redirecting whole websites or single webpages with mod_rewrite is a very important feature when doing search engine optimization (SEO) or when moving from one webserver or domain to another.

Redirection is usually done with a small block of code that is added to an .htaccess file in your websites root path. The code snippet looks like:

RewriteEngine on 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.example\.com$ 
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301]

It is often misunderstood and the bulletin boards have hundrets of incomplete or wrong assumptions about Apache and mod_rewrite. That's why I decided to write an article about it.

The surface of a computer and of computer-alike devices like smart phones or gps navigation are well styled and designed. Characteristic examples of those stylish devices are Windows Vista or any Apple device. There are menus and windows popping up, whirling arround, scaling and zooming, fading in or out.

RAID names a concept of using several hard disks as if they were single. It's the abbreviation for Redundant Array of Independent Disks (I guess and wont verify this now). There are 7 or 8 different RAID configuration options, but the most common for desktop PCs are NRAID (JBOD), 0 and 1. This might be because most modern mainboards only support these three. Perhaps they only those 3 modes because that's most common for desktops... however.

Recently my workstation died a quiet death and I suddenly was without a computer at home. Well, glad as I am, it was not that suddenly at all, because I knew there was something wrong with either the mainboard or the power supply. I had some backups on an external storage and therefore there was not too much data loss to fear. Weeks ago I bought a new PC for about 500 Euros willing to work hard for me.

These days I modified my config for the open source FPS / egoshooter Sauerbraten. It's purpose is to bind the weapons to specific keys around the movement keys I prefer (which are S,D,F and E). Furthermore I introduced an auto-jump feature which in the script is called "dance_mode". Certain weapons implicitely make me jump after firing, especially the rocket launcher, which is one of my favourite weapons in Sauerbraten.

Today I let you participate in my odyssey through two of the CMS stars at the PHP sky. Drupal 6 and Joomla 1.5 are the latest generation of CMS. Both are also announcing themselves as PHP Application Frameworks and both have a powerful developers community behind them. At a brief look these CMS seem to have good concepts behind them. In this article I talk about Drupal. My Joomla experience has just started and will be the topic of a later article.