More work has been done on ConTrak Systems, v2. In fact, more than eight hours' worth of work in the past two nights. I'm hammering everything out and creating some good stuff. I can't quite bring myself to say "good-looking stuff" because I still maintain that my design skills are far from where they should be to make ConTrak development a fully one-man show. But I'm the only one working on it because of two reasons, in this order: I'm the only one crazy enough to work free and I want full ownership of this when it's all done. Tangents aside, let me get back to the topic of this post.
Though I am working on the sysadmin Convention Administration page, this work frequently branches off into other areas. For instance, I set up and implemented code where specific events by users will cause whatever is in session for other users to be modified, but only if those events occur. Let me put that in perspective: if I as sysadmin allow a department to be shown while another user for the convention is logged in, the user would have had to log out before s/he saw the department because the department information is kept in memory (session) for that user.
If you have been following my ConTrak postings here, you should have come across the Rich Drop Down Menu (Rich DDL Menu) I created for use in ConTrak. (Tangent: I have almost completed the fifth, necessary stage mentioned in those posts.) To prevent users from having to download a lot of dynamically-generated JavaScript, the department and action menus are AJAX-based. On my laptop, these are fast enough (I tried setting the project up on DevFolio, but that didn't go so well in the ten minutes I tried it). However, when the session must be modified, you will see some lag. While waiting, a small wait box comes up to let you know it is working and disappears when the menu appears.
All this development--especially the AJAX-based development, makes ConTrak look close to a program you would have installed on your computer. While my intent was to make the interface look like a Windows application, I am still as yet not good enough with design to pull that off (because I can't come up with an effective design--not because I can't program it). With that one page created, my opinion of the rest of the ConTrak v2 project is high.
On a side note, I found myself playing with the page I created. My favorite phrase when I am confident and really like something accidentally slipped my lips: "This is freaking cool" soon followed by "Just beautiful." Yeah; point in favor of opening ConTrak up to other conventions if things keep going like this. I certainly hope things go well; I don't want this to be in vain. This almost makes me want to release a CTP later on. Anyway, I’ll post some early screen shots of the new “Convention Wizard” when I create it in the next few weeks. The wizard will be an ongoing thing because it will need modification every time I add a new department to ConTrak.
Hours spent on the ConTrak v2 project thus far: 46.72 (spec writing and paper design are never included)
