One of the problems with this journal is that oftentimes I'll want to talk pre-emptively about something I might do. Then sometimes I never get around to doing it, so I feel like I've let people down (specifically in regards to Tabulas stuff). I've also read in many journals to underpromise and overdeliver your product. At the risk of overpromising and underdelivering, I've thrown all caution to the wind and will be very actively writing about the new version of Tabulas (official version release is 2.1, which is pretty arbitrary number; maybe I'll change it to 2.71828 before I'm done!). I've decided that unlike Mac, I will name my Tabulas releases after harmless animals (they name their OS X upgrades after cats ... Panther, Tiger, etc.). Tabulas 2.1 (or 2.71828), will be code-named Tokki (Korean for bunny rabbit).

In any case, I'm in the midst of putting down the general control panel framework/architecture. Here are some goals I'm hoping to achieve with the new control panel (these are personal goals).

• Rewritten XHTML/CSS design:
  The new markup is much cleaner than the existing version. I also have CSS-ified most of the elements on the control panel (for example, the tabs will be text and be created with CSS). The markup must be very lean; right no sans content it's coming up at around 2 KB of markup! Even better, the new design is LIQUID! I've never been a big fan of liquid designs, but recently I've decided that a site like the control panel requires a functional design - if people have higher resolutions, they should get more real estate on the app! (Why did it take me so long to come to this conclusion? I think I just used to be lazy... it's so much easier to make fixed width layouts)
• CSS organization:
  I keep running into problems (both at work and with Tabulas) where the CSS just gets unmanageable. Both on a class-level ("Did I already write a class to handle this type of padding?" and "What the heck does *this* class do?!) and on an inheritance level. To that end, I've been making sure that I'm handling inheritance properly ... I've also been writing very specific classes so there's no overlap (e.g. #left .quickEntries p { } as opposed to what I might have done earlier (.quickEntries p {}). It's leading to a lot extra markup, but getting a sense of the document tree in the CSS is invaluable. I'm also using more descriptive class names.
• HTML Markup generation
  This really shows how anal I am but the markup generated by the backend must be formatted nicely so that when you view the source, it's pretty. This is perhaps the most ridiculous thing, since it really doesn't matter what it looks like ... but it really matters a lot to me. If you view the existing output of any Tabulas page (like mine, you'll notice the entries are being formatted nicely. I like clean markup.
• Future language extensibility
  I'm handling output messages and stuff in a separate language file, so that in the future if anyone is willing to translate one of those language files, people can immediately use a different language for their control panel. Usability, baby!
• Clean file organization on the server
  Again, I'm overly detail-oriented. I need the FTP to look pretty. CSS files need to be in /2.1/css/. JS needs to be in /2.1/jscripts/. Images need to be in /2.1/images/. Logic files? /functions/. Not a single end-user will care, but when I log-in via FTP, I don't like messy folders.
• Proper use of GET/POST
  I'm going to be using a lot of Ajax-type stuff in Tabulas, but there will be fallbacks to GET and POST driven events. I was also incorrectly using GET in the previous versions of Tabulas; GET should not trigger an event!
• Better user-driven options for control panel
  Some users like certain features. Others don't. There should be more than one way to display items. I'm taking advantage of sessions in PHP ... you will be able to customize a LOT more your Tabulas experience (and Tabulas will remember it!)

This is not, by any means, an inclusive list. This is what I've been working on over the past few days - as I continue to develop Tabulas, I'm sure you'll see more posts about ridiculous small goals... cause to me, the ridiculous small details makes or breaks a site.

Here's to details!