You know, for a native English speaker, it’s probably hard to take a company named “Softage” seriously, even if it is Russian.

Amazingly, a certain Scottish company does…

Regarding the blog: a lot of stuff still isn’t working. This includes the “archive” and “rss” links, plus proper pagination (the main page is currently set to display the last 20 posts). Comments work, but old comments still need to be imported from WordPress — and since many of them are anonymous and new comments are OpenID-only, I’ll need another hack field…

Edit: And pagination works now. I’ll try to deploy this pagination to the QDB this evening, to replace the awfully hackish one it currently has.

Here we go.

Written from scratch… sort of. I used the CakePHP MVC framework modeled after Ruby on Rails, and despite my complete inexperience with MVC frameworks, I found it very clean, easy to learn and intuitive. Actually allowed me to write the entire thing in two days.

And if we have such awesomeness for the good old PHP, why do we need Ruby to begin with?

The source code is available in SVN at the SourceForge page (CakePHP should be downloaded separately – it requires no installation and works with both PHP4 and PHP5). New features compared to Chirpy (the old QDB engine) include OpenID integration, the bioreactor, and new formatting, done with TFN in mind.

Yes, I am obsessed with OpenID integration.

It was actually quite a pain importing data from the old QDB. They’re kept in separate MySQL databases (lucidfox.org has two of them), and for some reason, both the mysql and mysqli APIs plain old refused to connect to either of them, and I’m certain I wrote the calls correctly. PDO worked, though.