Things I’ve done this week (it’s been a busy one):

• Went to the Bristol Games Hub Unity Meet-up – really interesting talks and demos. Looking forward to more regular meet-ups.
• Went to the Bristol Games Hub and Full Indie UK showcase evening – some great games on show. I enjoyed the evening but left feeling a bit demoralised as the games in the showcase were all a lot better than Bubblision. I’d like to be positive and say “it’s something to aim for” but it does add a bit more pressure to these sorts of show/tell sessions as I approach the day when I decide to present what I’ve been doing.
• Upgraded RF1 to use Django 1.6.3
• Upgraded the Glossary to use CakePHP 2.4.7
• Looked into the required changes to Zen Cart to make version 1.5.1 work with PHP 5.4. Somewhat surprisingly the Zen Cart GitHub repo is no use as the 5.4 changes are committed into the current ‘unstable’ code (which is for version 1.6). The result is that the forum posts about this tell you to implement changes from various commits but the commits are on files that are not in the same state as the stable release. You can’t deploy the 1.5.2 version (which is compatible with PHP 5.4) as it’s beta despite the fact that it’s been in beta since last year. I think it’s a right mess and it’s hard to see how the developers could’ve made it much harder for people. I like to think I’m pretty tech-savvy so I can go through the files and work out where the changes should go … this being on the assumption that if the devs say to make those changes then they should be OK even if the underlying file has changed. I do wonder what other people do though when faced with a host that wants to upgrade to PHP 5.4 but source code that is incompatible with PHP 5.4 at the last stable release and the commits you have to apply are vague and are documented only on pre-release code… As it’s on GitHub I could just fork the stable release and apply the fixes to that so it’s available to all but, based on my last experience of reaching out to try and help with Zen Cart, I don’t think it’s worth the effort. It’s a shame but bad experiences with comunities make you want to spend your time elsewhere. This specific episode (rather than the community issue) has made me wonder about whether a migration to Magento might be a better approach once I’ve sorted out the current, more pressing, changes.
• Fixed a couple of long term issues with Apache on my laptop (yay!)
• I’m back teaching again (yay!) so updated my notes for the two sessions I presented this week.
• Finally finished Level Up! The Guide to Great Video Design … 4/5 stars
• Started reading The Making of Prince of Persia by Jordan Mechner

Although there’s a fair amount of game stuff going on in the above list I didn’t actually get anything done on Bubblision…. should do this week though.