Flashes of Panic

…I’d still be relying on my own two feet.

I spent a chunk of Friday downtime starting to suss out the web app I’ve been calling “the wish list.” I created the subdomain and database on my host, laid out the database tables as best I could guess (I’m sure they’ll need tweaking as I go along, though,) and started thinking through site flow (that is, where a user starts, where they can go from there, where they can go from there, etc.)

I came up with half a dozen pages just for access control and authentication alone, and got discouraged with trying to imagine it all in detail, so this morning I’ve started coding up the access control parts. It’s easier than I’d expected; I forgot about PHP’s session functions, which make it pretty easy to remember that someone has authenticated (and who they authenticated as) through a session, then “forget” that data when they log out by closing the session. I’m hoping I can complete all the user-handling code today, then put some evenings this week in to the list-handling code.

I’m discovering that what’s different about this one is that the application is more complicated than the data. Most of what I’ve dealt with at work is just two different views of the data, the content manager’s view and the reader’s view. Here, how much of each record (and which records) are displayed is heavily dependent on what user is asking for it; there’s a lot of query and presentation logic in the application, so I have to do a lot more PHP thinking, and not as much MySQL thinking.

I haven’t even started to think about the presentation layer; everything is in bare, unstyled default HTML. I’m going to need a style sheet one of these days.

Now playing: Six O’Clock News from Failer by Kathleen Edwards