Advice on how to make hacks

[rrottman]

Originally Posted by MindTrix

because................?

MindTrix, I'm happy I finally found somebody at somewhat the same stage as I am... :-) However I though you were a master hacker already... .

I'm coming from a Java, J2EE, Servlet, JSP and Struts background, so I can kind of "read" most of the PHP stuff right away, although the notion of objects seems a little bit "injected" into the language.

I highly recommend to print out the .php files. I don't recommend to try to follow them "on screen". I printed out all of them on a color printer and just try to read through them "offline".

The thing which confuses me most is the overwhelming use of arrays by the vB team. And I'm really missing a basic developer documentation outlining what all the vars, consts and array actually mean in terms of the business objects they represent. Some of them have pretty explanatory names but there are paragraphs I've read n times without understanding even a bit of what and why they are doing things... .

I still think the vB team produces the best and most efficient php code around. So learning from their files is definitely a great privilege.

I also highly recommend Zend's Studio Pro which gives you a great debugger with variable tracing which helps a lot stepping through a vB session.

I still believe it might make sense to create a dedicated forum here at vb.org which focusses not on small hacks but on concepts, guides, documentation of code.