Wednesday, September 12th, 2007
New DevScripts Site is up - Finally!
Well, the past few months have been extremely busy for me. Actually, the last time I had posted anything was JUST before I had started development on DevScripts.
DevScripts is basically an online script directory, which needed to be rewritten and needs to be cleaned up badly. Buttloads of Software applications made their way into the listing along with an unsalvagable/unrefactorable code base - yuck!
– rant –
Something along the lines of designers being “too dumb” to understand php tags and simple php constructs, so they MIGHT break the application I could see them saying - “why give them the chance to break your app? use our custom templating language! it’s easy to learn. Don’t worry about the overhead, we have a caching system!” — blah blah blah… I could rant on about how Smarty is solving a problem that doesn’t exist or can’t be solved by teaching your template (or web) designer some basic PHP syntax and how even if mistakes were made, would be easy to fix, but I’m straying from my gripe about old devscripts using Smarty.
– end rant –
While Smarty is already in itself a poor choice for a view layer, doing it for a site which is managed by developers was even worse.
Bottom line - we scrapped the old code and Smarty with it.
Doing the requirements document, it did not seem to be too much work however, as we got developin’, DevScripts proved to be quite a bit more than I had expected. We went from “a conversion will only take 6 weeks” to “let’s inject some functionality into this” and so we did. 8 weeks down the track, after waiting for the Server to be set up for about a week and a bit or so, the public beta went up - and it still is up! Check it out at http://www.devscripts.com/
I thought that it was a very smooth landing, however, we did not get the show on the road fast enough - but I guess this will come in time. Next project, I’ll be sure to bring the team’s focus on hauling ass.
on Thursday, September 13th, 2007 at 7:42 pm:
Nice site! Did you use a framework or did you code it from scratch? I’m just starting a large web app at work and I’m interested in your approach. Also did you use a specific methodology or anything like TDD?
on Sunday, September 23rd, 2007 at 11:33 pm:
Mr David,
Great job with the site. I see a lot of potential for it, but the categories are a little all over the place. This site defecates all over the old site, but it seems you’ve carried on the old site’s confused categorization?
Not wanting to rain on your parade, the site is great, but I think the actual content is filled with mess - I see that it’s in beta. Any luck in actually fixing it before the final version is out?
I’ve followed your progressfor a while. I think it’s an interesting path you’ve taken as a developer. Congratulations on your project and your framework reaching 2.1.
JH
on Thursday, September 27th, 2007 at 9:58 am:
Hi James,
Thank you for your comments. As you have noticed, we are currently still in public beta mode and are currently tweaking some things on the site. For instance, you may notice now that we have sorted the main category listings by the number of scripts it has rather than alphabetically, and changed some things with regards to the width of the legend/footnote indicating what each folder icon means. These are the types of things we are currently toying with and keeping a close eye on the finer details.
We are definitely looking at the categories… There are quite a few things content wise that we’d need to tidy up before going public. As you said, it’s a mess. Expect to see changes shortly.
> I’ve followed your progressfor a while. I think it’s an interesting path you’ve taken as a developer.
I did not realise my progression as a Developer was so public. Unless… are you the James who had taken over the RSD Projects after I parted ways with DBG? If so, send me an email. http://www.rvdavid.net/contact.php
Regards.
on Thursday, September 27th, 2007 at 5:37 pm:
>> are you the James who had taken over the RSD Projects after I parted ways with DBG?
Yes it is. :) never got to meet you in person, but I did read your notes.
I should get a blog up too, but I’m not as commited as you are. hah! :D
I’ve moved on from RSD as well, now taking shorter contracts. They tried to milk me for everything on the RSD project.
I’ve sent you an email as requested.
Nice site man. I used it for a couple of JavaScript and PHP scripts when I was too lazy to create one, Just going through it again now. I’ll put up some of my own scripts on the site while I’m at it.
jh
on Friday, September 28th, 2007 at 1:23 am:
Great. My vision for the new version of devscripts is that it’s a more semantic resource for scripts and not just another place to spamvertise.
Ideally, DevScripts will be one of the places where people can go to, to search for quality commercial, free (open source and free as in free beer) scripts.
My team and I would appreciate the feedback you could give us as we are always going to be looking to improve on it as we go one with it.
Thank you for your comments.