No screen shots on this one, just waffle. I’ve gone a bit overboard on what I originally planned to do and I think I’m now officially in tinkering mode. I didn’t intend on having user accounts and therefore the ability to comment but I have added that back in. I think my logic was that it would be cool to have people comment on the old reviews. Not sure if that’s a good idea or not?
Of course I couldn’t just put this stuff back in like it was on the old MPQ. Comment spam is now a problem so I’ve used a combination of user accounts and CAPTCHA’s to hopefully stop it. And I couldn’t just put in a plain comment input, I’ve had to do a preview screen as well since that’s what you have to do now. Also because I added user accounts I needed register, login, logout and edit account screens… oh and a reset and email me password option.
Then there’s download tracking, i.e. counting how many downloads a map gets. More for personal interest than anything but that led to a bunch of code, a new table and a list maps by download option. I did attempt this on the original site but never finished the code.
Anyway, this is definitely a bad case of feature creep!
I think though, other than bug fixing, I’m done coding. I’ve decided to draw a line (actually I can’t think what else to add… well other than the option to input reviews, but I don’t want to go down that road!) What’s left to sort out now is data related, like messed up formatting in review / article text, map downloads, review images and misc text and pages on the site. I’m hoping to get that done in the next week to have something ready for testing not long after, but we’ll see.
I think it´s a good thing that you decided to add the comments so even if it did result in more work for you I think many will appreciate it.
..now where´s my salt?
I was thinking about making it so that existing comments are in slightly different colours so that new ones stand out more…
Ah yes, the salt, must remember to get some when we go shopping.