Anego CMS Modules - Report 1

Week 1
I've spent most time contemplating on how to build a good UI for the Gallery module and researching on HTML5 File upload. Since there is already existing libraries for Drag&Drop file upload I don't have to reinvent the wheel. However as this technology is fairly new, I guess not to many solutions exists for it yet. At least not as jQuery plugin, which for me is a must for better code quality. In particular I've been weighing the pros and cons of:

• jQuery filedrop: A basic do-it-yourself Drag&Drop file upload that only covers the actual uploading and lets the user implement all the UI related stuff.
• jQuery File Upload: A fully featured Drag&Drop file upload with GUI that has it all, but requires jQuery UI and the jQuery Templates plugin.

In the end I decided to go for jQuery filedrop because I have a strong desire to directly integrate the uploading part into the gallery view, which is not possible with the already integrated UI of jQuery File Upload. 


Week 2
This week I mostly invested in a massive refactoring of the module system of Anego and improve the code style in many areas to increase the readability and extensibility. Towards the end of the week I was able to implement the basic Drag&Drop file upload and thumbnail generation. The most important infrastructure for the gallery module is now ready. This basically means the most important design decisions are made and it's mostly just fleshing out each functionality now.

Also I'm am happy to report that Anego also has been accepted as part of a project for my Lecture 'Advanced Software Engineering' where a Team of 6 Students (including me) will do some great improvements on the core  system. The blog and gallery module stays untouched by this though - they are treated as a different project.

A new Project: 2 Anego CMS Modules

Starting from last week, I have begun a new project that will focus on 2 modules of my experimental content management system Anego CMS. This project will end not later than January 2011 due to the fact that this project will be part of my bachelor studies in software engineering.

Anego is a new, basic and still pretty unstable (in terms of backwards compatibility) cms that I have been working on for the last few years and is powering not only my website (tyron.at) but also my wife's (saraty.com), my brother's (simpleit.at) and any small business websites that I can make my customer (I've got 3 so far!) ;-)

My CMS is using a new model for representing a website page - it is broken down into elements that can be dragged and organized to the users preference. Each of these elements is seen as a "Content Element" plugin/module that users may add and remove to Anego.

There already exists a very basic blog module that allows the creation, editing and deleting of blog entries and a simple comment feature to each blog entry. My Job is it now to improve the blog module, that include the following points:
- Module Interface - The current implementation of module support within Anego is rather unstable, it may have to change quite substantially, thus any already written modules will need to be adjusted accordingly
- Pagination - Currently all blog entries are displayed in one page. Proper pagination needs to be added.
- Archive and Navigation - There currently no overview over the written blog entries, an intelligent way of displaying a list of blog entries needs to be found, as well as implementing archivation features (navigation by year/month or similar)
- RSS Feeds - A blog without RSS support is quite useless.
- Settings: A settings dialog for changing some basic properties such as commenting, entries per page, etc. should be added.
- Comment Anti-Spam and maybe signup by google/facebook/openid/etc: The current implementation of comments may be vulnerable to spam
- Ideally possibility of writing hidden drafts and preview

Also I will implement a Gallery module that should have at least following features:
- HTML5 Multi-Upload-Support and ideally batch-resizing of Pictures
- Display gallery as grid with fancy zooming
- Drag&Drop reordering of pictures
And depending on the required time investment I would also add:
- Gallery Settings: Allowing some display options such as thumbnail size, picture descriptions, pre-loading of images, image zoom type, maybe watermark
- Different gallery display types: classic gallery, image slider, etc.

So altogether its going to be an exciting winter!