Arggh Feb 26, 2004 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. ... ➦

Mid-Year with Moderator Feb 16, 2004 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.

IE Feb 11, 2004 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 Feb 01, 2004 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. ... ➦

XML, XSL Jan 30, 2004 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. ... ➦

XML, XSLT Jan 28, 2004 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. Generating RSS feeds. The masses of files for each template is now reduced to a single XSLT file, easily modified by anyone knowing what they are doing. Better compliance with web standards (missing “‘s, closing tags all need to be corrected) means that it should be relatively XHTML compliant when tested. ... ➦

Huzzah Jan 23, 2004 Hurrah, exams over for another few months. I’m glad, and completely exhausted by them all. I was feeling completely overrun by them all. Still now its time to kick back and relax…until er – Monday

Ming Jan 05, 2004 I should really write something about whats been going on over the Christmas hols, but I don’t want to waste any time which could be used for revision. What I will say though is that I’ve just discovered a sourceforge project called “Ming” which allows for easy SWF (Flash) output with php. This could come in really handy in that it could be used to generate templates with animated content, such as recent additions or news feeds in side blocks. ... ➦

Project - again... Dec 13, 2003 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. ... ➦

Absolutely Knackered... Nov 28, 2003 I’ve been totally caning it over the last week or so…. I’ve got this Opengl graphics project due in very soon, and I’ve been working like a bit of a bandit on it. On the other side of the coin, I’ve got a databases piece due in on the same day which I haven’t made a start on yet. Guess I’ll be doing that over the weekend. Those will be in next week and then I’ll have some time to get moving on my project again…. ... ➦