On the PHP Path

My current web development project, a PHP-Nuke driven site, is coming together very quickly and very slowly at the same time.
Most of the site is sorted out and for a three-week turnaround, it’s been going pretty smoothly. Launch is scheduled for June 15th. The clients are doing double time on getting the content ready while I code. If we pull a few more late nights, we should make it.
But I’m currently tackling an 1800 line chunk of hellish code that manages the user accounts. The client requested a customisation that the system isn’t designed to do at all. So I’m rewriting the module. Well, not really rewriting as much as mangling. Which is why things seem to be going rather slowly right now. I keep getting stuck, digging around for answers, reversing, trying again, getting stuck a different way (which I consider excellent progress) asking Tod for help, fixing things, breaking them again, and repeat ad infinitum.
Eventually, I will come out on the other side of this with a deeper understanding of PHP and MySQL. Not that I really want it (I’d rather be making videos) but I guess you get what you get.