I’m starting to get a hang of the frameworks I’ve chosen, and they’re starting to fit into my general design. I’m beginning by working on the site administration side of things: the basics of the module framework are in place, along with a module to add, edit, and delete pages of text (and HTML) for display on the website.
Some things I have learned:
- If you plan on using the PHP header() command, then make sure you don’t use smarty’s display() function. Instead, assign everything to a variable using fetch() and print the variable at the end.
- PEAR::MDB2 makes things very easy, but the verbosity of the SQL errors is lacking.
- I have a ways to go in making effective use of GIT.
What I will be doing next:
- Admin module for basic convention information. This will take the form of a global variable/object that can be accessed for information in other features, like visual templates.
- User management. This is a big deal; I don’t like the libraries that I’ve seen out there so far, so I’ll be doing it from scratch. Hopefully I don’t create any glaring security holes.
After that:
- End-user front-end. We’ll start with the read-only stuff that doesn’t require user log-in.
- Game information. I want to add functionality for registered users to propose a game via a form, which admins can approve, modify, or deny.
We’ll see how all this goes over before attacking the big kahuna: scheduling. I’ll be thinking long and hard about the model that we’ll be using so it’s going in last.
One reply on “ConCMS: It’s alive!”
I thought of a few things I liked about Aeon, the Arcanacon system and include them here as food for thought. One was that players could see who had already logged into existing sessions, not just the number of people. So if you knew their username, you could book yourself into a session with mates of yours.
The other thing was that it would do a little con schedule calendar at the top level, so you could see at glance what games were running session in what sessions. For example, if you checked out http://www.eye-con.info/index.php?module=pages&page=schedule, you would see a table in that format and with a list of when the games were running in what slots. Currently, you have to click on a particular time slot and scroll up and down through the list to see if a game you want to play is in that session. Does that make sense? If not, let me know.