Happy New Year 2010

It's four days into the new year, and I've had more sunshine in that short time than in the last 3 months together. I'm reasonably sure this applies to Pascal as well, given that at the moment he's making sure the southern hemisphere gets a little CwS love, too. Seems like a good opportunity to say thanks to you, for reading and contributing to our site over the last 12 months.

What was

The most exciting thing for CwS in 2008 must've been that Pascal and I got to spend about half the year working together, as real life desk neighbours at Photobox, when I managed to hire him for 2 projects in spring and autumn.

We got around to churn out some lovely best practice code (almost all Zend Framework based) and wrote about it. Gaining some traction with CwS, we started looking into other distribution channels, Twitter being the first, and our articles were gladly picked up by PHPDeveloper as well as the Zend DevZone. I always meant to write about the increase of traffic and the benefit of hustling your site a little bit (we received some very helpful comments in the process, so it's not all just numbers and pretty graphs), but didn't get around to it. I guess you'll have to trust me on this one.

What definitely wasn't was a series about tips I wanted to publish for people newer to the world of web development, mostly because Roger Johansson had the same idea round-about the same time, and he does it so much better.

For your collective and individual enjoyment, I've grouped our 15 most popular posts in (not necessarily from) 2009:

1. A CSS Framework
2. Fixing the Back Button and Enabling Bookmarking for AJAX Apps
3. Modular CSS
4. Unit testing controllers with Zend Framework
5. CSS Background image on html image element?
6. Deploying PHP applications with Vlad and SVN
7. Dynamic tables with XSLT
8. Clean URLs for a better search engine ranking
9. Find your node: Advanced XPATH commands
10. A caching pattern for models
11. XML validation in PHP
12. 4 ssh config tips for faster remote working
13. CSS is Worthless
14. My take on jQuery charts
15. Unit testing web service based models in Zend Framework

What will be (maybe)

Of course we're looking forward to another year of CwS that will discuss all aspects of web technology that we deal with, client and server side. Right now there are many exciting news on the horizon (if not already knocking on our door daily), I'm thinking Zend Framework 2.0, PHP 5.3, push concepts such as Comet (especially in the PHP world), and of course the exciting new world of HTML 5 with all its possibilities and pitfalls. The last word in deployment and build processes is surely not spoken without having a look at integrating dpkg or rpm mechanisms, and in more concrete news, I'm doing a PHP certification this year, so hopefully you'll hear some of my experience learned there, too.

Of course we're still open for contributors to write a post here and there, so feel free to contact us if you've got an idea or maybe simply a nice code example you'd like to share.

This leaves me with wishing you all a happy new year, thanks again for being such a smart audience. Here's to you and a great 2010,

from all of us at Content with Style