Managing Meals

Recently we’ve been making a lot of backend progress. I would say there really is 1 more feature that will be hard, another 2 that will take a little time, and then a couple more that arent even worth mentioning and we will be ready for sitewide testing.

To do the testing i plan on having 2 others and myself use it like a normal user would. Once we feel comfortable that all is as it should be we’ll be putting it up for the world to use. Hopefully it wont take long before we get a couple users that are willing to give up feedback.

After our first release we already have a slew of new features slated that will make the site faster and easier to use. The only reason we are not doing them up front is because we would prefer to have a lot of input on everything before we go too deep in features.

Well, I guess I’ll get back to work. Hopefully we will have something to show before the end of the year…

While this site is written from scratch using no cms Im still creating a template of sorts and including (php) pages where appropriate. Today I’ve got most of the template done according to the original mock up we created. Tonight we will hopfully review the progress and make the needed changes to our design to hold all our content. After we’ve debated on all that I’ll implement the changes and begin creating features. I do have some of the backend already set up and some pages to interact but this is largely not started. I first wanted to get the layout so i didnt have to tweak a lot of pages later on.

Speaking of layout, i forgot to mention yesterday that im primarily devloping in firefox 3.0.4. Occasioanlly im viewing in minefield and ie7. My goal is to make it barable on ie7 but ensure that it works on ie8. I will be installing ie8 on a virtual server to test there, though im sure i wont have any issues there since it is more standards compliant. If all goes to plan microsoft will be releasing IE8 in early-mid 2009 which is right when we should be finishing up. Even if we get done before that it still wont be long before IE7 die, unless your like my day job where they still install 6 by default.

We are developing this site locally until we have a stable build. We use WAMPSERVER as our development server with activestate komodo to generate the php files. I’ve been able to get the forum running and integrate with its users database. In somewhat related news i’ve updated our server to run the newest os packages and hosting software.

Yesterday we started development and design independently, and then late last night we purchased the domain. Since then we have set up email and this blog as well as starting to model our starting code to match the eventual template. Now that we have an official name we are modifying our design and mock logo and working on getting the holding index designed.

I’m hoping to have a usable website within spring ‘09, but you may see something up before then. I’ll try to post every couple days of work so you can get an understanding of how things are going.