I’ve spent every minute of the past three weeks working on Unknown Tales.

Well, that is, I would have if things like sleeping, travelling to and from work, work itself, eating, cleaning (both myself and the flat), gaming, going into town, and chilling out – hadn’t of got in the way.

I have, however, spent a good portion of the past three Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays working on the site, and I’m really starting to get the feeling that it will not be long before I can start doing some end-user testing on it.

Where I was

The last time I blogged about Unknown Tales I had just finished building a collection of mock-up pages designed to show what the various features of the site would look like, and how they all linked together. This was partly so I could show it off to you guys (which I did), but more importantly, so I could concentrate on the front-end user interface of the site, without the back-end code getting in the way.

I did the same thing for my Independent Study using  960.gs. This worked fairly well, and allowed me to get a prototype built very quickly. But if you take a look at the differences between the prototype, and the final edition of the site, you’ll see some gaping holes between the concept and the reality.

So this time I built the site using CakePHP’s Pages controller to serve the content, and built the entire thing myself using nothing but self coded XHTML and CSS – from scratch. This had the benefit of letting me use Cake functionality (such as the HTML helper) when designing the pages, meaning that when it came to working on the real version of each page, all I would have to do is copy-paste from the prototype, and just put the required variables into the right place.

Where I am now

Right now I’m far further along the development than I thought I would be. It is currently possible to:

• Log in and out of the site using the vBulletin user table.
• Navigate though the various genres, stories, chapters and paths.
• Add new chapters to existing stories.
• Add comments to individual chapters.
• Update the features box on the homepage.
• View a list of the latest stories, forum posts, and blog posts, in the footer of each page.

And probably a few more things, but that’s the majority of it for now.

What still needs to be done

Although I am quite proud of what I’ve built so far, I know that there is still a lot more work that needs to be done.

One of the main things that I’m holding off on for the moment is that of the administration system. In theory, this should be fairly easy once I get to it, but I want to take as much care building this as I can, so I don’t end up with something as poor as the IS edition of the site.

I also need to work on understanding vBulletin and CakePHP sessions. The idea is that I want for a user to be able to log into the site once, and then pass across to the community forum and remain logged in. I was unable to fix this problem in the IS edition, but I have an idea how I can make it work for this one – provided I can understand how the sessions work.

I also need to build in some other functionality, such as letting people bookmark their favourite chapters and submit their own stories, but that was relevantly easy to do in the IS edition, so I’m not anticipating any problems with this one.

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