Unfortunately, work doesn't give me too much time (or energy) to hack some Tabulas stuff out. I made a concerted effort to stay in this weekend (at the risk of totally burning out doing webdev, but I think reading helped to balance that out) and learn some more Javascript DOM stuff and mess around with XML over JS (aka Ajax aka DHTML aka blahblahblah) to start developing a toolset that will allow me to build the next generation control panel for Tabulas.

The first "more-than-proof-of-concept-but-not-quite-development-ready" pages involve gallery management.

(All example links require you to be logged into Tabulas and have some images in albums in your gallery).

The first gallery management tool allows you to edit image filenames and descriptions from within the page without having to refresh the page data. Simply click the image name or description, and a input box will show up instead of the text; put in your description/title and hit 'save' and it'll save it without reloading the page! Sweet!

The next gallery management tool is an image-sorting tool. The current method of setting the order of images in an album is the most retarded methodology ever. The new sorting tool actually generates the images, and you can DRAG them in the order you want them to be in your album; then you hit save. And best of all - no flash or anything! It's all DOM!

(The sorting tool is built from tool-man.org, which is a lovely set of MIT licensed JS classes that do all the hard lifting for you in the sorting!)

Open-source rules. Share ... and the world benefits! :)

You can't see it, but my-test.tabulas.com is using a completely rewritten backend.