Oh look, it’s 2005 already

Glad to hear things are going fine with development of IP.Dynamic.

A good and exciting 2005 to you!

It’s indeed good to know that IPD is going well.

I have a question. I know this entry is about IPD, there hasn’t been much talk about IPB 2.1 and what it is going to include. I know there is supposed to be an announcement about it later this week like you said in the topic for IPB 2.1.

However, I need something answered, is there going to be comprehensive custom admin privleges in IPB 2.1?(Not sure what to call it) Thanks.

DONT MENTION IPB 2.1!!
Instead of falling off of Earth (BTW, Earth is supposed to be capalized… its a place, and a thing) he’ll jump!!!

There will be an announcement “SOON” -Matt

Haha yes I know I know. I have to learn to stop bugging

“and I’m relishing the challenge of doing something else other than re-invent the wheel with forum software.”

–I can’t even begin to tell you how exciting and comforting it is to for all of us Forum customers to know your feelings about developing the “forum”.

There’s no need to take it out of proportion.
With a forum system, the fundemental concepts are set in stone. You have forums, topics and posts. The fun is in making a forum easy to use and by inventing new tools to make moderating easier and to allow your members to interact with each other.

However, you are pretty much re-inventing the wheel, no matter how much fun it is.

A CMS is much less set in stone and you have a lot of room to change the fundemental concepts. I enjoy writing IPB - it’s a passion of mine but I’m also enjoying working on something else.

Out of interest, when you had decided roughly what shape you wanted IP.D to take and what key features it would have, what was the *very first* piece of code you wrote? I’m always curious as to how these huge projects get started.

Invision Power Dynamic has been a bit of a slow burner over the past 18 months or so. I only started writing the firm code in early September of 2004.

I’ve written a few basic CMS for friends, relatives and customers. I even had an eary version of IP.Dynamic working on a site (site now dead and that version scrapped).

We’ve used custom CMS on our own websites for a few years now and each time I have to edit something on our site, I get a “Hmm, it’d be great if I could…” moment.

I spent a few months with nothing more than a pad and a pencil doing a ton of research. I’ve read books, websites and tested nearly every CMS I can get my hands on from open source CMS (patchy quality, rough interface) to high end CMS (+$10,000, needs training to use) and worked out a short list of things I like and a long list of things I hate.

I’ve then written out a basic feature chart with a heading and fleshed out some sub-features. I’ve also spent a long time looking at work flow and content acquisition and how these elements go into making a final page. I’ve listed all the main elements (meta data, metatorial framework, input templates, output templates, content repository, content maintenance, content editors, staffing roles) and written a description of how I’d like each to be handled and how they interact with each other.

Then, I roughed out (using the same pad and pencil) a basic user interface and then did a few HTML mock-ups. I then wrote the web-framework (display the CP, log into the CP, move between pages of CP, permission checks) as well as several key classes (rich text editor class, page caching class, meta data field class, display class) and finished the PHP file structure (sources/controlpanel/$main_section/$sub_section) and the OOP particulars and started to write the main code for each main section to build an initial framework.

Once the ball is rolling with an existing framework, it’s very easy to ‘hang’ new features on it.

I’ve done a fair bit of refactoring and reworking of existing code as a concept has developed which isn’t the most efficient method, but it’s the one that suits me best.

Good to see that things are active on this front.

*looks at http://www.invisiondynamic.com/flowcharts/flowchart_content.gif * w00t!
You can parse PDF & Illustrator??
—

A lot of the features you’ve written about so far are pretty much all problems I meet when coding a CMS. It’s indeed hard to find a CMS that is suitable in every possible situation and has easy template management in combination with dynamic content without blocking the road to future standards and innovation and still allowing other/company developers to extend it. In other words it is hard find a _perfect CMS_

With all the digital communities, blogs and stress (caused by bad economy), website automation has become an important part of internet development.

Now more websites are getting really large, finding ontopic content is getting harder. Even though Google indexes almost everything it can read and has nice filters, it is still hard to find only to information you are looking for. When I look at the development of MacOSX Tiger I see that Apple designed a system that allows you to search you entire computer nomatter where and in which app you are (in apps that use the SpotLight plugin) and returns _only_ the stuff you want and filters out the rest you don’t need. It would be a great feature to have something like Spotlight integrated into IP.Dynamic. Of course you should link it to the ‘error reporting engine’ so when someone try to view a non-existing page the site returns page suggestions (ie. http://php.net/jpeg) instead of just a useless 404… *hint hint*