My current web development project, a PHP-Nuke driven site, is coming together very quickly and very slowly at the same time.
Most of the site is sorted out and for a three-week turnaround, it's been going pretty smoothly. Launch is scheduled for June 15th. The clients are doing double time on getting the content ready while I code. If we pull a few more late nights, we should make it.
But I'm currently tackling an 1800 line chunk of hellish code that manages the user accounts. The client requested a customisation that the system isn't designed to do at all. So I'm rewriting the module. Well, not really rewriting as much as mangling. Which is why things seem to be going rather slowly right now. I keep getting stuck, digging around for answers, reversing, trying again, getting stuck a different way (which I consider excellent progress) asking Tod for help, fixing things, breaking them again, and repeat ad infinitum.
Eventually, I will come out on the other side of this with a deeper understanding of PHP and MySQL. Not that I really want it (I'd rather be making videos) but I guess you get what you get.
I definitely can relate - I inherited several applications here at my job that were written, quite poorly I might add, in PHP, and looking at the code, I don't understand how they do work, its scary, they shouldn't work yet somehow they do. It only makes our jobs harder as we have to port code and improve it.
I miss coding in cold fusion, Its been a while since I did it, but since you started me on it at Duquesne, I've used it for a lot of things...so thanks :)
PHPNuke is known for being one big coding problem. Yes it 'works', but every fork so far starts off with the goal of junking the core and starting from scratch. The guy that made it basically learned as he went along and didn't have the people skills to work with a team. I suspect it will fall to the side to the much more robust TIKI or Mambo. To keep tabs on all these projects, I use http://www.opensourcecms.com