Plan for James "Nycto" Frasca

SheerDrive extravaganza

Per my previous .plans, I've been working on a PHP/MySQL CMS for the last 2 years. Yup, that's right; I just recently hit the 2 year mark on this project. And what do I have to show for it? Not counting comments, white spaces, XML files and CSS files:

9,116 Lines of code.

That includes the core files, 6 themes, 13 modules and numerous panels I have constructed for the project. It may seem like a meager amount for 2 years of work, but it is something I am very proud of. I have kept out the bloat and kept in the functionality. I can't imagine how many lines of code I have actually written that didn't make the final cut. As I have grown as a programmer I have gone through and rewritten a lot of things to make them stronger, better, faster.

Curious how many lines of code the core files have? I was too:

4810

And keep in mind that not all those lines of code are being run every time a page is viewed. It just so happens that I calculated the base number of lines of code it takes to display a page.

1577

I can't say I've researched how much code is needed to display a PHPnuke or PostNuke page, but I promise you it isn't that low.

Anyway, enough statistics. I'm at a point where all the basics are done and I can start adding in comfort. For example, last night I finished a class to generate Charts on the fly. Allow me to show you what the output looks like:




Take a look at the point markers on the line chart. When I was programming those I wanted the programmer or artist to be able to customize what they look like. My solution harkens back to my programming origins.

I started coding when I was 8 or 9 in QBasic. This was when amber monitors where the standard. After I wrote the obligatory text adventures I started getting in to 2D graphics. I wrote a nifty game where two drunken wizards battled each other. Anyway, for those of you that don't remember, QBasic used the DRAW function to create most of its graphics. You would send it a list of directions and it would move the 'cursor' around, leaving a trail of color. It took me about 15 minutes to recreate that functionality in PHP. I guess you never know what experiences will come in handy. My brother described it as "01d sk001."

I started work on that class because I'm working on an E-Commerce module for my CMS, which, by the way, I am calling SheerDrive. I wanted users to be able to visualize their sales statistics. It will also come in handy for the visitor tracking module I wrote.

I've kind of given up trying to set a date for when I will have a release. I have a lot of further plans and I'm really busy with college at the moment. But before I do release it, I will be looking for sites to help test the code. I don't do graphics design, but I will be personally supporting the code for the site and making changes based on feedback. I'll post another plan when I'm at the point that I can start doing this.

Until next time.