Working on revamping the control panel has been tougher than I thought. Part of this was my vacillation on key features/aspects of data handling which led to rewrites and more rewrites. (Example: How are 'drafts' and 'private entries' different? Answer: They're not. Or they are. Or they're not)

In any case, I've also wanted to add in a lot of features that require a lot of database changes (e.g. multiple category selection for a selected entry) ... so to add these changes in transparently into the exising Tabulas DB while rewriting the control panel has been a time-consuming and nerve-racking task in itself.

Part of the other trouble is simple motivation; this control panel isn't just an aesthetic change; it's also implementing a lot of new features... I'm in essence rewriting most of Tabulas ... not just the way entries are handled, but also the gallery output, the content pages/links output, the hit logging output ... so it's been very discouraging for me to see so much left to do... but I've just gotta chip away at the huge block. One day I'll wake up and find that the block is almost gone (Yay!)

The spell-check feature has been giving me nightmares. It works fine, but there are a few *big* UI issues that I cannot address because it involves me learning Javascript (beyond my crude Neanderthalic understanding of JS) ... so I know once the spellcheck feature is released, I'll probably receive a lot of (justified) complaints. But small steps. Small steps.

With some intermittency, I've been working with Borst on the Lightbox7 uploader... the uploading works fine (there are a slew of UI issues to deal with ... but Borst had been working diligently until he got sick) ... but we don't have the handshake portion from client to server down pat yet.

But the benefit of all this is that the work is being done on a separate URL ... so people could in technicality access the new control panel to add their entries and whatnot. I may do that to test the new entry addition engine (which took a week (!!!!!) to write) while I hack out the other features. (Any volunteers?)

But yeah. So much crud to do, so little time. None of this even factors in my workload for Audiomatch, which I have been hacking away at (only a few minutes a day ... but I'd like to devote about half an hour to an hour later today on it)...


AHHHHHHH. SOMEONE SAVE ME!!!