A couple of years ago, I, along with every other web developer on the planet fell in love with Chris Pederick’s Web Developer Toolbar. This amazing extension does everything but code the site for you. Features such as easy access validation, outlining and live css editing help to ease the struggle of developing under tight deadlines. Needless to say, my projects wouldn’t be the same without it.

Until recently, I couldn’t fathom the idea of another Firefox extension taking title of being the ultimate tool for web developers. Then, I found Firebug.

Instead of going through all of the cool features available is this wonderful little utility, I urge you to watch the screen cast and download the extension. I’m sure that you will agree, Firebug is a welcome addition to any web developer’s tool kit.

For the past three weeks, I have been trying out text pattern as a CMS. I want to clarify my headline by saying that text pattern is a great cms/blogging tool. It’s just that it isn’t the right tool for the project that I am working on.

Installing and configuring textpattern was an absolute breeze. I found a ton of support groups and modules that I could use to get the most out of the cms. Standards support and css customization was extremely easy to implement on this open source application.

The biggest problem that I ran in to was the inability to create sub sections. For example, I needed to have /site/books/drama/something.html and all that was available was /site/books/something.html. I’m sure their is a way around this, but I didn’t want to get in to the whole, I have a new CMS tool that I love but have to customize it to meet my needs. This road block gave me an immediate bad taste and I decided to code the CMS myself.

In the end, I have to say that text pattern is my new favorite blogging tool and I will probably use it for smaller sites. If you are working on larger news sites or are creating a website that requires a relatively deep site structure, look elsewhere.