either way at the moment the fastest, cheapest and most reliable from my travels in this sphere is Vodafone home phone and broadband… and they are pretty much as crap as all Irish ISP’s…

And yes I agree Ripwave (yuk)!

UPC looked like a good alternative but it’s not available in this area yet.

3G looks like an option but it limits itself to one user per dongle which means having to share and that’s an argument starting already!

You are between a rock and a hard place here – if you go with an alternative provider you will be locked in to a minimum contract period (usually 12 months).

One thing which you can approach Imagine about (and I have used this in the past) is to ask them if it is OK to use a Ripwave device (yuk) until the Wi-Max service is available in your area. Get them to commit to waiving the Ripwave contract when you upgrade to Wi-Max. Note that you may be in an area of marginal Wi-Max coverage anyway, but in that case it would be difficult for them to enforce a minimum contract. Make sure you establish their policy (in writing) if you pursue this route.

Another option (and one I couldn’t possibly condone) is to sign up for a 3G trial. Most companies will give you a month’s trial without obligation – just make sure you end your trial before the month is up and make sure there are no hidden charges. There are enough operators in Ireland to get you about three months of connectivity using this method, by which time Imagine should be over their technical difficulties!

Should I take this as a warning and pull out of the deal and go with UPC or another non Eircom based broadband supplier?

Just wanted to say I’m looking into Tina MVC.
WordPress technically already *is* MVC architected (in a way), so this may be overkill, templates = view, WP_query = model WP_Rewrite = controller.

Yes, it can be. However there are a myriad of action hooks and filters that you need to read up on. I wanted to be as non-invasive as possible and trapping a url call using WP_Rewrite was frankly something I didn’t consider. In the end I ended up trapping a call by hooking into the parse_query action hook and replacing (or generating) the post content and the post title.
I’ll certainly look at WP_Rewrite again (well, for the first time!). When I first started with Tina, I found it difficult to get information on how to hook in my custom page properly, and I just dove straight in.
Using Wordpress templates was ruled out for two reasons:
– they are theme dependent (and I wanted to keep all a Tina applications files in one location)
– they are parsed after browser output starts (which prevents the use of HTTP headers)
However by using the “replace post content” approach the generated page content just uses whatever theme template file you want and retains all other functionality that Wordpress gives you.

With custom post types with post meta and custom comment types with comment meta, profile and profile meta, almost any data can be abstracted into the standard wp table structure.

Yes – I’ll certainly be looking at that. So far, I haven’t had a need to (either I wasn’t using a DB or couldn’t use the Wordpress DB for reasons of data sensitivity). The base model class is pretty much just a skeleton at the moment, so it would be pretty easy to use the custom data stores in Wordpress.

I see a lot recreating the wheel here with your custom tina-mvc escape functions which are in core esc_attr() etc.. .

Good point (and I can’t remember my rational at the time). The recursive escaping function is now using the WP esc_hmtl() function (in the 0.3 development branch).

Have you checked out Rasmus’ no-framework MVC framework?

Not until now – but it is an excellent piece and I would agree with most of it.
Tina MVC was primarily written to replace a custom web framework that I’ve been using for a few years. While there are things I don’t like about Wordpress (for example, it is a memory hog) it “does what it says on the tin”, is well maintained, has plenty of third party support and removes the necessity to maintain code. The custom login/registration/etc mechanism is another good example of recreating the wheel, but again it was done to replicate some core behavior in the framework Tina is replacing.

The form helper is good work though, I haven’t seen anything like that in WP core, or have I missed it?

Thanks. I was quite surprised that there wasn’t something similar in the core. I hate coding forms!
There may well be other ways of hooking into WP that I missed when I started, but this was a bit of a learning experience with me – it was my first proper dive into WP code. I’m currently reorganising Tina and adding a few bells/whistles in the 0.3 branch. Check it out if you have time.
Thanks again for the feedback and for looking at Tina.
If you can, let me know how you get on.

You have a contact us and a reply form on the same page

You are right… I’ll fix that and copy your comment and my reply to /tina-mvc-for-wordpress/
Thanks.