Joel Hainley

Perhaps I’ll write more about this later, but for now suffice it to say that the 11-05 challenge has been cancelled.

ClikClock has been trundling along with me being able to dedicate approximately 4-5 hours a week to get stuff done.

I built out the account settings code at the end of last week so now we have account configuration working within the site, this will be useful for adding/removing certain options/features on individual accounts as an administrator, as  well as the account administrators themselves being able to set certain preferences for their accounts.

Having a single settings mechanism for settings that are read only for the users but editable by the site administrators, or the account administrators presented a few challenges until I hit upon the idea of simply having the ability to set “edit roles” for a particular setting. So I could pull up the details of a setting and be able to say “this setting can only be edited by this role”. I have this implemented and am looking forward to seeing how it works out, there are some obvious permutations to doing something like this but I don’t want to dive too deep on this functionality until I am sure it will be useful.

I have updated my git repository with the latest changes and offered a new dump of my codebase to the other challenger in the 11-05 challenge. I have sent over dumps of my current code before in an effort to help him out in this challenge, but I suspect he takes the code simply to avoid any hurt feelings. HA!

Plan for this week :

Finish the  New Account Setup wizard – there are a few features/functionality I think I am going to have to add to the framework to finish this task so I’m going to keep this item as the only todo until my next update.

I haven’t been working on the project much the last few weeks, been doing a fair amount of getting out of doors while the weather is nice and soaking up some sunshine and a fair amount of beer.

In the last couple of days I was able to get the migration/deployment stuff figured out for the application which was the last piece that I wanted to have in place before I started pushing alpha builds to a public server. So I anticipate having a publicly accessible demo of the product within the next month or so.

The major pieces I am going to be working on next are :

1. Signup wizard : I need to have a way to guide new users into the creation of an account
2. Reports functionality : not terribly useful to capture all of the data if you can’t get some reports out
3. Roles/Groups/Users stuff : I have a working version of this but there are a few things that I want to polish before I start using this heavily in the site
4. Account/User preferences infrastructure

Not a lot of progress on the 11-05 challenge. I could probably make the case that I’m giving Mike a chance to catch up but that would indicate that I’m a nice guy. I’m not. I’ve been on various vacations and also took some time out to clean out my garage…so we’ll call it a break. I’m now done with my vacations and ready to dig in and get this thing finished. I don’t have a list of action items for this week. I’ll just get settled in and see where things are and return to my regularly scheduled “here’s what I’m gonna do” type of post for next week.

I was able to get the application administration screens knocked out this week. I am almost ready to get an alpha build put on a public server and start handing out some accounts for people to start giving me feedback, there is a LOT more to do but I want to try and get this into people’s hands as quickly as possible.

Tasks for this week :

• new account setup wizard ( carry over from last week )
• ajax support routines need a little love
• finalize deployment strategy and get application onto a public server