F2BA Progress

The reason I haven’t been posting anything lately is because all of my time is being spent on the new Fly2Blue.com Administration System. Once completed, it will allow my customers to do just about anything on their site. I might as well use my blog as a place to start writing the feature list, as it will take me longer if I have to do it afterwards.

• Content Management
  • List items on a page.
  • Edit an item on a page using WSIWYG editor.
  • Add an item to the page using a WYSIWYG editor.
  • Delete item on a page.
  • Features to be implemented.
    • “Recycle Bin” type system, in case a customer accidentally delete on something that wasn’t intentional.
    • Support an unlimited hierarchical structure.
    • Ability to drag and drop items to sort them on the page (AJAX and JavaScript technology).
    • Deletion of multiple items by checking a box on the items to be deleted.
• User Relationship
  • Email the owner from contact form on webpage
  • Features to be implemented.
    • Option of an email, or Web based contact form solution.
• Site Management
  • Features to be implemented.
  • • Temporarily disable entire site. (back-end completed)
    • Detailed statistical tracking (front-end completed)
    • Change the title of the site.
    • Opt-out of statistics tracking tracking.

What am I currently working on?

01:32 on the 1st of September 2006

Currently database connection and FTP information is stored inside the main administration database. Although this meant it was easier for me to start the creation of the administration system, I have always been unhappy with the security aspect of this. I have decided that for a more secure option, the database and FTP information for the clients’ sites will now be stored in multiple that are not accessible from the web, using the PHP serialize() function to store the array of data.

02:43 on the 1st of September 2006

When I started coding this system around 2 weeks ago, everything was a rush and I made some code that went through unneccessary procedures to do what it was meant to do. For example, I have the userdata stored in an array, and I set another string with the UserID in, so when I had $UserData["UserID"], I copied it to a $UserData string, just to make the typing a little easier, however I hate writing sloppy code, so I’m going back to change all of those things.

02:50 on the 1st of September 2006

As mentioned before, the main initiation code is a mess. The option was to split it into more files which is an easy option, but it means a lot of includes, the code hasn’t actually improved, and if I want to find a bit of code, its like finidng a needle in a haystack. So I’ve decided to do this thing properly, and write classes for everything, meaning I just need to intiate the class and possibly a few functions within the class to get the thing working. This is called using Object-Oreintated Programming (OOP for short). It allows you to re-use code and makes things easier to debug (through use of an error handling class). The main advantage of using OOP is that you can create as many objects or “instances” of a class as you wish. This is a hard concept to explain, and it took me a while to understand fully what advantage is gained from using an OOP style of coding. Anyway, enough ranting, on with the work.