I’m realling struggling at the moment to get a visual interface all sorted and loverly so people can literally “point-and-click”. I made the decision to do this after talks with both my supervisor and moderator and have been trying like crazy to get it sorted, its taken over a week so far! Not good.

My moderator also suggested that trying to find example XML schemas for CMS’s which were already out on the market at the moment for would make for good reading also.

I have to go see my supervisor this week anyway, will post to say how it went.

Just had my mid-year meeting follow-up with my moderator. It seems he would like to see a focus on XML standards for this system, rather than just a botch of XML which I decided on. Don’t really know how I decide on that.

On searching for them though I found a CMS XML framework (uh-oh) which basically just outputs everything as XML. Find it here.

Just realised that my cms doesn’t display properly in IE6. Might explain why it looked so dodgy at my mid-year meeting with my supervisor.

Got a few extra things in my project, permission system is fully functional, priorities for roles, workflow management – all of which still have bugs. Going to get down to the actual “management” part of the CMS tomorrow.

What a waste of a day that was…I hate programming.

I’ve spent most of the day stuck on trivial little tasks like trying to pass back multi-dimensional arrays through scripts, and interpret the results.

On an upside, I’ve managed to get XSL producing XHTML output and generated a working grid for the actions in the system. I also found a bug in XSL which means that it will condense textarea tags to their smallest form, and resulting in incorrect display in most web browsers.

After spending most of the day working upon it, I have managed to convert the whole template system in my project over to XML. I also added the beginnings of a permissions system which has no functionality yet.

This does need some time for me to go through the motions of Spec, Design, Implementation write-up for this over the weekend so that I can present it next week during my mid-year progress presentation with my project supervisor.

I’ve spent a large portion of today converting bits of my project over to using XML with XSLT stylesheets. This solves a few issues that I’d had problems with.

1. Generating RSS feeds.
2. The masses of files for each template is now reduced to a single XSLT file, easily modified by anyone knowing what they are doing.
3. Better compliance with web standards (missing “’s, closing tags all need to be corrected) means that it should be relatively XHTML compliant when tested.
4. Well layed out source.

I haven’t completely finished moving over to this new format but will try and sort it all by the end of tommorow.

After having been working like theres no tomorrow on other coursework, I’ve finally managed to come back to my project work.

I’ve really not got very much productive work done on it aside from a few class diagrams and workflow routines which I’ve put together. I have been working on a prototype over the last month however in order to have that side of things produced on time. Currently it doesn’t do a lot more than add or delete users and needs to come a lot further before its something impressive which is worthy to be shown to my supervisor.

I’m spending this next week in producing the documents which I really should of put together a long time ago. I’ll have to hang around up here until the end of the week I think. I had made a start at writing the requirements spec but it was nothing more than a draft really.

Hopefully I will of finalised everything by the end of the week so I can have a more enjoyable christmas at home.

I’ve been trying to make some headway on my cms project today in order to get ahead and not end up in the same situation as I had in the second year. Seeing as I have a distinct lack of all things coursework related at the mo, I thought that would be a diamond idea. Unfortunately my knowledge of what now goes into a project is somewhat sparse, and I’m finding it a right job knowing where to tackle first. I need to churn out some sort of prototype before the semester is up in order to show it to my supervisor at the start of next year.

Used today (yesterday, actually) to take a look over the various things that can be done when using XML and XLST together. All in all it seems very impressive, and can hugely alter the way which a document may first be formatted. This may be a valid reason to choose this method over more standard CSS techniques, which generally just alter bog standard settings like color, font-size ….

On a side note, I also managed to get an NT install of CVS sorted and working nicely on my machine. I think this will come in most handy when I finally get down to a bit of prototyping (which hopefully is the not-too-distant future).