Single Blog View

I doubt anyone’s been wondering about this, but on the off chance that it was something you were interested in, I thought I’d let you know what goes on behind the scenes. The website that you view is less than half of what has been created. For every part of this site, there are some administration tools. Really just a web interface that lets me (or Mr. O) make changes to the data on the site on the fly. As all of the actual data is stored in a database, it’s pretty easy to create a front end that lets you make updates.

If you’ve looked at the photos part of the site, it’s no coincidence that each of the pages look the same. I’ve created a front end tool that allows me to link to a directory, enter the page title and it will upload all the pictures in the specified directory, create thumbnails and the double click pictures, then create the pages that are you get to see. Pretty clever, even if I say so myself.

The big challenge really is that it takes more effort to create the maintenance tools than it does to create the part of the site itself. Take, for example, the forum section that I’ve just created. The site bit itself is quite clever in that it only uses four pages that display different data depending on variables that are passed to each page. On top of that there are another 11 files that allow you to create the entries (categories, sub-categories, thread titles and thread details) and edit the thread details if necessary making a total of 15 files.

There are 22 files in use to support the forums. These allow me to edit or delete any of the entries made. The ability to delete is actually the hardest thing to program here as you need to make it a cascading delete otherwise you would be left with orphaned records, for example, being left with sub-categories that don’t have a category to belong to. In addition to that, I created the ability to move either sub-categories or thread titles – so, if a thread seems to be in the wrong place I can just move it (or if many similar threads get posted under “Other” I can create a new category and move them over). Before you ask, you don’t need to move a category – just editing it has the same effect. There’s no real reason to move a thread detail – it’s unlikely to be posted in the wrong place, but in the unlikely event that it was, it’s probably easier to just cut and paste it into the new position (and by cut and paste I mean create a new entry in the right place with the same text and delete the old record).

So, if you were wondering, now you know.