Proposed Project
Ok, I’m really bored. So… let’s propose a project. It’s been a long time since I used PHP, and that experiment ( a home-brewed guestbook ) failed miserably. Lately, I’ve noticed I am always making a list of books from the library which I’d like to eventually check out and read. Inevitably, I lose these lists, have to start all over, lose the new list… ad infinitum. The proposed project is a Web-based PHP management system; this would alleviate the problem by allowing me to upload all the lists’ data unto the Net. I sat down and wrote up a spec (I forgot the technical software engineering term) of the desired program, including both basic features which necessarily must be coded, and luxury features that are nowhere integral to the functionality of the software. With that in mind, in no particular order, here are the features I came up with:
- it should handle data from flat-files or MySQL dbs
- when using a db to store data, it should bootstrap
- it should separate administrator level access from visitor level access
- it should store the book name, names of the editors and/or authors, the date of the entry, the location of the book, and any miscellaneous notes desired
- it should allow custom (immutable) querying of the db in visitor mode and raw querying in the admin mode
- it should check for redundant entries
- it should be possible to categorize the entries, specifically, to keep track of: what’s being read, what has been read, and the priority books should be read in
- it should keep book ratings
Whew! That was a good mouthful. Hopefully this project will fare better than my last– an attempt to write a general purpose college level course planning program, which never proceeded much even into the specification stages. I’m thinking of making a new page dedicated wholly to this. But we’ll see: it all depends on whether my enthusiasm stays or goes.
Possibly relevant posts:
- Meta Category setup (1/23/2005)
- My first mug shot (1/28/2006)
- Due South (3/26/2002)