Recently I looked for advanced social bookmarking script for one project of ours. One of my picks for this tasks was newscloud . The site looks really nice and it looks fully featured script for social bookmarking niche. However, there are lots of problems with the script itself.
The upsides is its features: Videos, RSS integration, posts, voting. Also, it is relatively easy to install. Although the developers have not made full installation script, it is quite easy to dump the data to the database.
The downsides… Well
1. The script is written using quite bad programing experience – it does not check if variables exists prior using them, there is very few checks for the returned data. This is quite important, as we tried to launch it on php5.
2. The coding is very loose. Although they try to use some patterns and design practices, but some output is generated already at db layer, what makes it troublesome to modify the script (and believe me, it requires modification).
3. Some things that should be set in config is distributed through code. For example, if you want to set a base url, you would need to edit lots of source code. And similar.
To sum it all, Pick newscloud only if you are ready to spend days in modifying it, or better get another script – it will be faster. You don’t want to launch exact dublicate, don’t you ?
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Boonex - bad programming example · November 26, 2008 at 8:35 am
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