I am old. I’m so old that, when I entered the industry, we didn’t have specializations like “frontend” and “backend” developers. You just had developers, and everybody just sort muddled about. As web browsers have migrated from “document display tool” to “enh, basically an operating system,” in terms of complexity, these two branches of development have gotten increasingly siloed.

Which creates problems, like the one Carlena found. You see, the front-end folks didn’t like the way things like quotes were displaying. A quote or a single quote should be represented as a character entity- &#39, for example.

Content Management Systems always end up suffering, at least a little, from the Inner Platform Effect. There’s the additional problem that, unlike say, a big ol’ enterprise HR system or similar, CMSes are useful for just about everyone. It’s a quick and easy way to put together a site which anyone can maintain. But it never has enough features for your content. So you always install plugins- plugins of wildly varying quality and compatibility.

Lucio Crusca was doing a security audit of a Joomla site, found this block inside an installed plugin:

Jim J's co-worker showed him this little snippet in the codebase.

  foreach (ToolStripMenuItem item in documentMenuItem.DropDownItems)
  {
      item.Enabled = item.Enabled ? Document.Status == DocumentStatusConsts.New : item.Enabled;
  }

Julien’s employer has switched their payroll operations to a hosted solution. The hosted solution has some… interesting features. The fact that it has a “share” button, implying you can share your paystub infromation with other people is unusual (but good: keeping salaries confidential only helps management underpay their employees). More problematic is that this feature emails it, and instead of putting in an email address manually, you instead pick off a drop-down list- which contains the email of every user of the hosted system.

Seeing this, Julien had to take a peek at the code, just to see what other horrors might lurk in there.

Here in the US, “tax season” is extended into the summer. No one likes dealing with taxes, obviously, but we agree that the social benefits outweigh the costs.

I can’t speak to how folks feel in Italy. But Riccardo B was perusing the Italian Revenue Service’s (INPS) website, and was having a bad time of it. This website was recently “modernized”, which Riccardo tells us cost €300M (I wasn’t able to track down much on this, and since I don’t speak Italian, I’ll take Riccardo’s word on it), so “having a bad time” doesn’t seem like it should be part of the process.