Road Map
There isn't much to be seen here yet, but there will be within about two
weeks (by, say, 17 March or so, I'd like). I'll try to get this rewritten and
presented in a better format soon. Right now it's sort of a brainstorming
session. Sort of a freewrite, if you will.
I'm expecting the first release to be very soon. It will be pre-alpha, in
the sense that it's ugly, there's a good chance there are lots of bugs, and it
takes a blowtorch and some manual dexterity to install.
A brief description of this project:
Home Library provides a web-driven interface to a personal (or semi-personal,
say, shared with a family and a few friends) library. It allows you to keep
track of your books, where they are, if they're loaned (to whom and when).
There's a lot more planned for the future of the project. Some if it is
related to core functionality, some of it is to make it prettier, some of it is
to make the implementation better:
- Functionality
- Media - Ultimately the library will be able to handle collections of
more than just books. Some of the design for this is already in place in the
database structure, but it needs to be filled out. For example, in the future
may be movies, CDs, games, magazines, and possibly other collections as
desired.
- Users - Currently user management is very low-level. You have to be
added to the database at the database level, for example with the
mysql program. This will change.
- Flesh Out - by this I mean that the interface needs to handle more of
what can be stored--right now it doesn't support adding, for example, edition or
publisher of a book. Very easy to change, just needs to be done.
- Translations - Not all books are English, so I'd like to be able to
offer translations into various languages. For this and themes/styles below, I'm
thinking about modeling the interface somewhat after phpbb. That seems like a
decent solution for both. However, since I'm not creating a forum, it may take
a while to cut out what I need from their project and clean it up for mine.
- More Library-ish - I'm not restricting this to be an informal
friends-only type thing. I would seriously consider fleshing this out to be
more formal with capacity for registration, membership, due dates, fees,
reserve, request, e-mail recall, limits on checkout, who knows. I'm open to
suggestions, at any rate, though this wouldn't happen for a while yet.
- ??? - I'm not limiting the project to what's listed, as it's just
starting. More functionality will be offered as I figure out/learn from others
what's desired.
- Beautification
- Layout - Okay, the HTML right now is extremely straightforward, and
mostly just to get it to work. Once it all works, it can be redesigned into
something that looks much better. My aim is to keep it all HTML 4.01 Strict and
using CSS for style.
- Themes/Styles - Perhaps more in the future, I'd like to allow for
different themes and styles.
- Implementation
- AJAX - Right now, a lot of the search is done with AJAX. It works
beautifully on Firefox 1.5, which is my current test platform. But, alas, not
everyone uses Firefox, so I need to be sure it works with a wider audience.
That may involve finding a nice way of doing a non-AJAX solution as well.
- phpbb - As mentioned above, I'm thinking about moving it to be more
like phpbb, as that provides an easy way to do themes/styles/translations.
- Users - As mentioned above, the users control is rather kludgy right
now. I not only need a better interface for control, but I need better control.
I am again intending to model this somewhat after phpbb.
- ??? - I'm sure there is a lot more I need to worry with. Let's start
with what I can easily identify, shall we?
As you can see, there's a lot planned for this project. Oh, and this webpage
sucks, yeah. I'll try to improve it in more time.
Briefly, about me:
I'm Rhett Robinson, currently the sole admin/developer to this project. I
started it sometime around 20 February 2006, registered it on sourceforge on 28
February 2006, and am now starting this page on 2 March 2006. I'm a graduate
student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill studying economics.
I hold a B.S. in Computer Science and in Mathematical Sciences from Clemson
University. I have contributed very slightly to Gaim, and created BookLick, but that's about all that's been under
the public eye.
Last Modified: 4 March 2006 13:43 EST