I thought I’d make a quick post about what I’ve been up to. It dawned on me that I’d been neglecting my own site and I should probably write something to let people know I haven’t just been playing World of Warcraft 24/7.
Work
I’ve been doing a number of contracts for clients including Boston Pizza (or “Boston’s”, in the States), Klondike Contracting, Royal Pacific Realty, 1-800-GOT-JUNK, AVW-TELAV and Skookum Clothing. All the work was programming-related; it seems like I’m no longer doing any design work at all (which, let’s face it, is probably a good thing!). But most of my time has been spent on…
Form Tools 2
The Form Tools core is complete, as are about 7 or 8 modules (2 or 3 of which will be included in the standard build), 3 themes and the API. The base CMS for the documentation is written, as is a fair chunk of the documentation itself. The new Subversion repository has been designed, and I’ve automated a number of common tasks like generating Beta branches and tags from within a simple UI (so I don’t screw anything up!).
Short-sightedly, I made some posts on the Form Tools site saying the Beta will be released shortly – not taking into account all the other work on the site that needs to be completed first. Right now I’m focusing on the upgrade mechanism. Unlike Form Tools 1.x, from a technical standpoint, upgrading is now a far more complicated process: I couldn’t just allow people to overwrite all old files like before. Now it has to take into account versions and compatibilities of the various components of the script, specifically:
- Form Tools Core
- Module versions
- Theme versions
- API version
- Language Pack versions
But here’s the cool part. Upgrading is actually JUST as simple as before – if not simpler! In the Form Tools script, there’s an “upgrade” button. That submits all relevant information about core, module, theme and API version to the upgrade script hosted on formtools.org. That then does the dirty work of figuring out which components have new versions available and if they’re compatible.
From the backend point of view, it’s all governed with Subversion and a custom CMS. Once SVN has been updated with the latest files, the new versions are logged in the database and marked as ready for download. What’s especially nice is that written to support other developers and designers to allow them to submit their modules and themes.
Anyway, it’s a big job. I’m still shooting for getting the first Beta out the door before Dec 31, but I won’t feel too bad if it gets pushed to the New Year.
