Saturday, October 22, 2011

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.

No comments:

Post a Comment