Interspire Developer Update (Week Ending 11th August 2006)

Published 08/11/2006 by Mitchell Harper

Hi everyone,
We've decided that at the end of every week we will post a "developer update", letting everyone know what each team member has been up to lately. They will be posted every week at about 4pm Friday Sydney time (AEST - GMT+10).

ALEXEY:

I've been working on the next release of DevEdit. I have been fixing a few bugs we've discovered recently, and am compiling a list of feature for the next release. I've been working with Rod, Mitch and Chris to test and fix the bugs, and we're looking at putting out a minor release next week sometime.

ROD:

This week ActiveKB support has been pretty crazy, probably because of the new release and as a result I had my first all support, no development day since I started working here. I've also been working on getting the WebEdit 6 release out and as a result have ended up helping out with DevEdit since the sticking points for the WebEdit release seem to be DevEdit bugs. I've also been trying to get the ActiveKB documentation updated to reflect the state of NX2 and add things like how to set the permissions for IIS etc.

CHRIS:

It has been another busy week with support this week, most days it takes 5-6 hours so I don't get a lot of development time unfortunately. Part of that is good, if we get a lot of common questions about a particular feature, it's easier for us to see what area(s) needs work - whether it's displaying a better (more descriptive) error message or making something clearer in the documentation.

I have been able to do a few things though. Stats are currently getting a huge update, we have pretty much completed newsletter stats, autoresponder stats & part of subscriber stats. The only thing after that is user stats! Phew!

I've also gone through most of the screens and added some javascript checks all over the place (eg making sure you add a subject, or making sure you fill in an email address where appropriate). These checks are all done in the PHP code as well but it's easier & better not to have to refresh the screen to get prompted about them. I prefer to do it that way (in PHP first) so I can do better data checks.

The other cool thing is that whilst creating or editing a newsletter, you don't have to refresh the page to import content from a URL or from a file upload ;) A bit more user-friendly this way I think!

Back to the trenches for me!

JORDIE:

Support for ArticleLive easily takes up half my working time, this week has been a lgiht week, but I've had weeks where support has taken up to 90% of my time, which doesn't leave much time for development unfortunately. However, this week I've been able to have enough time to start work on "Paid Articles" for ArticleLive which will use Paypal.

There will be a variety of options such as a single payment, payment per period or per category or article. I've also been doing some rather nice interface alterations to the control panel, including some nifty AJAX stuff - for example deleteing an article doesn't require a page load, and the '3 steps' for creating an article are now into 1 page using tabs across the top.

There are already a bunch other features that I've built such as a brand new CSS based template and a new user system. I'm hoping to get the paid articles finished next week and work on another really neat feature which I'll inform you about next week ;)

MITCH:

This week I've been working on ironing out bugs in SiteCenter NX before releasing. I am half way through my final list of "pre-alpha" bugs, and I should have them all done by the weekend. I've also been working on setting up the 50+ templates we have designed for SiteCenter.

Each template has to have a few specific styles designed for the drop down menus and also has to contain HTML that matches the doctype specified for that particular template. It's a tough job, but someone has to do it ;)

Interspire Developer Update (Week Ending 11th August 2006)

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