Books make good friends: they're always there for you, they don't care if you ignore them for a while, and they shut up when you want them to.
Today I posted a response to an Ask Slashdot entitled "Solving The Home Library Problem?" It seems that a few of you at /. actually took a look at my project, humble though it be right now, and took interest!
With that in mind, I'd like to make a brief statement about the project, its status, and development on it. Before I get carried away, I promise that there will be more information here in the near future (maybe two weeks) about the project.
First, I should again stress that it's in alpha. The feature set isn't fully established, and don't expect it to work flawlessly if you install it (I even got a report of the default admin/admin user not working... I admit to bad practice of not testing my releases, that will change over the next few releases). The next few releases should also see it get easier to install and more likely to work without huge glaring bugs, but the first few releases were primarily to get something out the door to anyone wanting to see it.
If anyone is interested in helping on the project, please let me know, as I'm sure there are ways to help. Until I get the framework a bit better nailed down I'm not going to add any developers to the sourceforge project, and I'm also not going to add anyone before getting to know you and seeing your code some. Thus, if you're interested in joining, establish communication with me and send me contributions. At some point I'll start making use of the CVS server sourceforge offers, and you can start sending patches. If you're helpful enough I might add you as a developer. Also, I'll start working more content on the site here soon including at least some screen shots, as setting up a demo might be counterproductive when each version would almost surely require a complete new install rather than just an upgrade.
That's what I can think to say immediately, but thanks for taking a look!
At this point, I've got some serious under-the-hood changes in progress, but very little in mind as far as the functionality that this application provides. I also plan on redesigning the visual aspect of it. As a basic recap of its present functionality:
Now, the point of this post: I want to know what types of features people would like to see for this application. Keep in mind that for now I'm primarily interested in this application at a personal/familial/friends-only level, not at the level a public library would use (though I'm not adverse to it taking that direction in the future). However, for now, what features would you be interested in seeing?
Please drop me a note at rhett_robinson@users.sf.net and let me know. Describe what types of things you'd like to see implemented, be they more information tracked, additional functionality, or anything else. I do eventually plan to add more than just books (i.e. music, magazines, movies, games, anything you might treat like a book in a library).
Well, I have made the second release. Mostly the changes for this release have been under the hood.
I've been borrowing some stuff from phpbb. For this release, that's mostly the session management. The rest of this release is pretty much the same as 0.0.1-alpha, but I thought I'd go ahead and get it out.
Some really important things about this release and future alpha releases: there will be no upgrade support (and little support in general). Use at your own risk. The database structure changed somewhat significantly since the first release, so if you just copied the files, it wouldn't work. If you dumped the tables not related to users, it should mostly work, but take a look at setup.sql to figure it out. In the future with non-alpha releases, I'll try to have better support for upgrading.
I have in mind that news will be about major changes to the project: either on this website or about the actual project. Well, I created a Notes page, because I found myself wanting to mention progress but thought that what I had to say didn't really belong as a main news item. The Notes page will contain brief entries about the project, but are not main items. Read the notes if you want to really keep track of what's going on in the project, and stick with the news (front page) if you are only interested in the big events related to the project, like releases.
homelibrary-0.0.1-alpha has been released.
This is an alpha release and is meant as a proof-of-concept more than for general use. It's got the core functionality I want, but little more than that, and there's a pretty good chance there are some significant bugs. However, I wanted to go ahead and get an initial release out so people could begin to get an idea of what this project will look like and how it will work.
The good news is that there are no known bugs, but the bad news is that's because it hasn't been tested much. There are almost surely lots of bugs and it's probably not too hard to corrupt the database if you're not careful (and probably pretty easy to do if you are careful).
The other important thing to note about this release is that it was made with the firm knowledge that the entire project will be undergoing significant structural changes. The first release was merely meant to get a minimally functioning product out the door. I plan to rewrite pretty much the entire implementation.
Books make good friends: they're always there for you, they don't care if you ignore them for a while, and they shut up when you want them to.