Blog

So, I have decided to try Fedora 15 for about a month. I've been using Ubuntu for about 3 years straight, time to try something different I think. I'm liking Fedora a lot, but haven't decided if I like Unity or Gnome Shell better. They both have their advantages I guess. Anyway, I've taken a little time off of Clay development. Its a busy time of the year and there's just too much going on. I will work on it as often as I can and now I have a new development environment to play with. I like Fedora better than Ubuntu so far.

Barksdale for a week. Sounds fun, right? It's probably not going to be...

Finally, for now, i've been considering setting up a mailbag like posting service in ClayCMS. I can use the service hooks, probably. I've been using Google+ with it's Picasa integration and email posting of pics. Very handy for someone like me without a smart phone.

I've been thinking about how to do a new theme for this site. The theme on here now is an example theme I've set up to standardize CSS and structural naming conventions. I want design something fun and more visually appealing for here, something a little more unique than what I normally use. Many I'll have time to play around with that this weekend too.

I hope to do a refresh of the site this weekend. I think the dashboard is close enough to completion to finish it up. I haven't worked on anything dealing with Clay in almost a month. There have been lots of things to work on around the house that I can't do during the winter months.

P.S. Sorry for the quiet second half of June. Also, I may have to do a refresh. It's looking like some of the coming changes will be a lot to push into an upgrade, especially considering this is the only site that will ever require this particular upgrade.

I'm still working on ClayCMS, slowly. I've been enjoying our short North Dakota summer a little too much to have enough free time for coding. I've also been studying to TSgt promotion for next year. I've been using a newly open sourced project called WebTester to help study. It is a testing (as in exams) script that lets me create practice tests. I have considered porting it over to ClayCMS, some day, and maybe working on some other educational apps.

I plan to release the first Alpha version of Clay next month. I still have quite a bit of work to do to reach the milestone, but I hope to at least begin to get Clay noticed a little.

Clay's Installer uses apps in the form of packages, which represent releasable products based on Clay. ClayCMS is an example of an Installer package. Packages can also be utilities to supplement tasks within the Installer. One supplemental package I've worked on a little is a boot selector, which enables you to run different web sites from a single web root, using as many different packages as you want. When Clay loads up it is given a site name, which then triggers the boot for a specific package. Currently, if someone wanted to run multiple sites, we'd have to either use different PHP files for the entry point or different web roots. The boot selector acts as a go-between, providing the ability to use the Installer to choose which site boots to which package, and then hands over the boot to the desired package.

I've only been able to do minimal testing, as it has been locally and not using domains, but there doesn't seem to be any performance hit from using the selector. It does mean an additional class is loaded, but the class methods only determine which package is to be loaded and then the normal boot process begins.

I'm hoping the boot selector will encourage developers to create new projects based on Clay and utilize the Clay Installer.

Apparently I forgot to push the upgrade to blogs that fixes the max title length. Guess I'll have to work that one in too!

I am thinking about pushing a Clay upgrade before I move on to stage 2 of the service interfaces deployment. The upgrade would probably kill about a week of ClayCMS work, because of the amount of code changes required for the upgrade (not to mention testing). The upgrade is intended to fix a well-intentioned feature of Clay's application object, which has turned out to be kind of a pain. The intent was to provide a way to create application objects through a single function. Unfortunately I never finished implementing the full intent of the function and it just makes the code harder to read. When I made the function I wasn't using PHP 5.3 or namespaces. With namespaces there hasn't really been a need to use it, other than standardization. Anyway, using more application objects has made me want to drop it completely, but I didn't want to postpone stage 1 any further.

I'm mostly happy with the way the dashboard is coming along. It's been kind of difficult to keep it simple enough to mesh well with any site theme, but luckily that's what stylesheets and template overrides are good for. I have to say there is already a huge difference between trying to use this site and the one on my development machine. The dashboard makes working with the site a lot easier. I got a little carried away with some of my testing, so I'll have to go through and clean out some test code before uploading the changes. Maybe stage 1 will show up this week, if I have enough free time.

I'll be glad when stage 2 is live, so I can relax the filtering on these posts. Not to mention all of the other cool things it will bring with it. Stage 2 will allow services for applications such as hooks (plugins), filters, blocks, and events. The hooks allow things like comments on posts. The filters add security and allow applications to transform content. Blocks are mini applications such as menus and links. Events can do lots of things, such as hit counters, tracks users online, and site statistics. Stage 2 will allow lots of new features, unfortunately they will take some time to add all of them.