This entry paints very broad strokes on what I'm doing with Tabulas over the upcoming weeks. I have to hold myself accountable somehow.

I've started spending what free time I have on the Tabulas control panel. After completely botching Tabulas 2.1 this past summer, I'm going to take an incremental approach to implementing the new control panel.

1. The first step (the step which I'm calling the "conversion") I'm going to take is the existing control panel files and simply update them; no new features will be added during this first round of work. All I want to accomplish is standardize the UI work and implement the new control panel look.
2. After I do the "conversion" stage, I'm going to add smaller features that I can port over from the Tabulas 2.1 work - this includes advanced backup features (backup for your gallery as well as RSS exports for your journal).
3. After I tackle that, I'll work on rewriting the front-end of Tabulas to the new system.
4. Then, I'll work on adding the advanced features that I'm looking forward to (advanced privacy controls).

Today, I started on the first step and converted over the first page on the control panel to the new backend on the development server. This page is now fully functional ... hurray for the first step!

The new control panel is very similar to the current one because I do really like the general layout - the new design simply tweaks things up and tightens up the spacing. I've also been a bit more rigorous in the navigation hierarchy - there are still some things I need to iron out, but you can get a general idea of what the new control panel will look like.

The goal is to create something much simpler, but that is feature-scalable - that is, adding a new feature isn't a burden for me in terms of changing the UI.