written by owen on 2015-Mar-05.

I have started doing the boring stuff of reprogramming parts of the website in order to get the new features in place. Some parts are easily shifted around while others have to be re-written, sometimes as much as 3 times. Prepare for technical blabbering

The upload forms

The form that allows the user to submit images to the website is really one of 3 copies, each although similar in interface is slightly different in the way it stores the form data. All this means is that any program code I write has to be translated 3 times and checked 3 times.
1. New post form: New posts and images uploaded on the front end and stay in a temporary session until they are fully submitted to the post_sub table.
2. Admin review form: all submitted items are reviewed in the admin area. These items are stored is a separate "post submitted" table until they are approved and transfer to the "live" table.
3. Website post form; approved items/posts can be edited aand updated now (which I never needed to do in the past) in the live tables.

All these 3 forms allow for multiple jpeg images to be uploaded/deleted and the item text/body to be edited in their respective states. Images can even have captions now.

Photo sets

When I first added photography to the website in 2004 you could only add one 500x375 picture. Back then we were limited by slow internet and small display monitors. Eventually I upped the size to 800x600 as speeds got faster, unfortunately I did not keep the original file uploaded back in 2004, so now all the old photos are stuck at thier low resolutions. Flash forward to today 2015 I am allowing multiple photos to be uploaded per post which will require me tinkering around with a lot of old code and CSS. Now instead of one big image, I will have fancy groups of images like on tumblr (pictured above). The last hurdle to cross now is how to determine when to generate the thumbnails to use instead of the full copies.

Comment form

As with the post form above, the comment forms also will have to be rewritten using my form controller class which was not available in 2005. I'll be reducing the amount of brain cells you need to post a comment. Hopefully the spam has reduced now compared to the high amount of comment spam that was around back in 2005.

Conclusion

That's pretty much all I am going to change for now hopefully the addition of multiple photos will enhance the content on post by post basis. Its going to take a little while for me to complete it all but I am steadily working through it.

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