After a few weeks of being too busy to code, I have finally settled back into a routine of working on my pub site. I have given up on frameworks, as all the ones I tried fell into one or more of the following boxes:
- Poor documentation.
- Difficult requirements (e.g. Lithium, which looks great but requires a version of PHP which is not yet in Debian stable).
- Missing components, such as an OpenID class.
Instead, I’ve linked lots of existing classes (MDB2 for database access, Smarty for templates, Zend_OpenId_Consumer for OpenID etc.) and created some extremely simple models for accessing database rows as objects.
The following tasks are now complete:
- All the basic backend code for connecting to the database, fetching and displaying data, checking whether a user is logged in etc.
- Logging in and creating a user account using OpenID – and the session handling code works for non-OpenID accounts too.
- Viewing individual pubs, and a list of the latest pubs added to the site.
Still to finish before launch:
- Creating a user account if you don’t have OpenID.
- Pub searching.
- Adding comments to pubs.
Ideally I’d like to have the ability to submit pubs ready before launch, but I don’t think that’s essential as I can do the initial database population myself. I want to have the basic version ready for when I go to Alderney towards the end of the month, which leaves just over two weeks to finish the bulk of the work.