3mension blog

Contrary to my previous post, development of the impressCMS module is advancing steadily. I’m no seasoned iCMS developer, and neither am I a PHP guru, so it is taking quite some time to achieve functionality some might wrap together in a few hours. Most of the time, I’ve been experimenting with possible approaches to code organisation and finding my way in the iCMS API documentation.

I am happy to announce that a major part of the core functionality has been written in its basic form. At the moment, it is possible to upload files accompanied by an image, a title and a description. It’s still butt-ugly at the moment, as no time has been devoted yet to the templates that should make everything look nice on the screen. Once the functionality is approaching what will be used on the production site, I’ll start looking at the presentation.

At the moment, the plugin is built with an old Xoops plugin to generate the classes. ImpressCMS 1.2 is still a bit too far off to wait for it to get to a state I am confident with to install on a website out in the open. That’s a shame really, as the IPF framework, in combination with the imbuilding plugin for iCMS 1.2.x is a very powerful and easy-to-use tool to develop with.

I started asking around about the feature set users would like to see. My first victims were on BlenderArtists. I plan to build a bit of momentum on the different forums towards the launch of the beta, which should be next month at the latest.