The roadmap for the next evolution of ProjectPier, a web-based project management tool based in origin on the popular BaseCamp application, has finally been published at http://www.projectpier.org/roadmap/0.8.5, after a six-month hiatus in communications.
The new release 0.8.5 is to be named Santa Monica (after the Santa Monica Pier, pun definitely intended), Read more…
April has passed, and it’s time to report with an update. At the moment, not much is visible of the progress that has been made thus far, but that’s not a correct view of the situation. I thought I might give an update on where the project is headed, what has been done, and what remains to be done.
My previous post, a long time ago, I elaborated a bit on the difficult choice between ImpressCMS and Xoops. As I read in the ImpressCMS forums, ‘A line is being drawn in the sand’, and these two CMS packages are each going their separate ways, without regard for compatibility between one another. That means one has to make a choice, and recently making that choice became much more difficult due to the evolving nature of the projects. Read more…
I have been working on a Xoops module to take care of the most important part of the site : the publishing and retrieval of 3d models. It’s rather crude at the moment, and I also have another fear: while Xoops is rather easy to get a working module for, the community is severely lacking some of the more polished modules/plugins one can find in more complex CMS platforms, such as Joomla or Drupal.
There is much work to be done to get the loose modules working together and the Xoops platform has lost much of its momentum last year during the period of infighting that spawned forks like ImpressCMS, chasing many talented developers away.
I seem to be coping at the moment, but it just seems more work to get to a point where other systems can take you with a standard install.
The first data model is ready, and I’ve already put it into SQL scripts to generate the database. It’s not that complex as of yet, all I want to store at the first iteration is the published file.
I installed the DAO class generator from the Xoops modules site. It takes an existing database table, and writes a data access Xoops class that should provide the needed functionality to use the database table in your module. It’s rather old (2004), but it seems to do the job just fine. I couldn’t find posts on the forums with warnings about Read more…
Well, I’ve taken the plunge now, there’s no going back. I posted a small announcement in my GarageGames blog about the 3mension project. I already got some positive comments, so this might even be a good idea after all!
Some people are subscribing to the announcement list, which is great. All that is also the best motivation to get a first version of the site online as soon as possible for people to try and break it, and to get feedback on the way things are handled and presented.
I have some fairly good idea about the direction I want to choose theme-wise. A first impression is included here. Feel free to comment.
Very proudly, I present the 3mension blog to the world. Some time ago, as I also mentioned on my personal page, I got the idea that some game art related services might be interesting. I’m a Torque Game Engine licensee, and an avid Blender supporter, and those are at least 2 communities that might benefit from such a service.
Unfortunately, setting up a website the way I imagined it, even in its most austere form, was not easy at all. Then the job got a bit in the way too, just to make things more interesting. I didn’t give up though, and I’m slowly building up the framework to run 3mension.com .
Firstly, I’ll build a Xoops-based version. I have most of my PHP development experience with that framework, and I think it will be a good exercise and a valid testcase for developing something other than a standard community site with news posts and a forum. Based on my experience, the decision will have to be made after the first version of the site whether to continue with Xoops, or if other frameworks provide more of the needed functionalities out of the box.
Right now, all I want is to do two things very well:
That seems to be two trivial goals, but don’t let that fool you. The word ‘easy’ is not difficult to write in a post like this, but it is not so easy to write the code for that elusive little word ‘easy’.
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