It is coming thick and fast today. Obviously this latest issue of .net is either suffering from too many pages and not enough content or it is actually an April Fool. Not only is the ruby on rails tutorial torturous to the point of unreadability but they follow this up with a tutorial on PHPizabi.
This time, the writing is perfectly readable and the tutorial follows reasonable step by step processes. However, it takes it to the level of idiocy. It runs from page 95 – 99 and is about four pages longer than it should be. The opening part of the tutorial is about how easy PHPizabi is to use and set up, yet it takes more tutorials than the impenetrable Ruby on Rails… What lunacy is this?
Page 1 is dedicated to unzipping the software and FTPing to your webspace. A whole page and 9 steps. If you use something other than the WinXP inbuilt zip handling or you use your own FTP client this whole page is pointless. Even if you are the three people in the world who use this set up, the article is pointless unless your level of IT literacy is incredibly low – if it is, why on Earth are you setting up your own social networking / dating site?
It continues in this vein. Each step is so simplistic you have to question the target audiences ability to actually read what is displayed on the screen. It is surrounded by “TOP TIP” boxes with things like this:
If you’re on an earlier version of Windows, you won’t be able to automatically extract the zip archive PHPizabi arrives in. Try PowerArchiver from www.powerarchiver.com. It also supports GZIP and RAR formats.
Good information but, I suspect, some what redundant for anyone other than a hermit who has been in his cave since 1994.
The next top tip is brilliant:
Parts of the current version of PHPizabi are encrypted using ionCube, a PHP encoding and decoding system. You may need specific server side support for ionCube, or perform some additional installation stages. Check out tinyurl.com/pzhtf
Amazing. People who need to be taught in NINE stages how to unzip an archive are also assumed to be able to determine the requirements for installation of this. Wow.
Honestly, I can only assume that this issue was one big April Fools joke, or that it is a bit of a quiet period and they were struggling for things to write tutorials about. Any sane human being would have swapped the Ruby torture-tutorial for the PHPizabi nonsense in a heartbeat. Maybe the editor has been on holiday?