A small fast update on te MageDB codebase.
The core module seems to be more painfull then expected and is hard to code.
Even thinking of the structure is hard.

That’s is for the fast update.
More next time,
Mark

It’s been a while since i posted here, but this now post comes with some new good information.
Previously i wasn’t sure on which framework i might gonna use or use parts of and which template system i might gonna use. Recent developments (of other people) did gave me a clue of what to use.

The template system
Well there are quite a few out there. New ones.. Old ones just name it and it’s probably out there on the internet. But in the beginning of 2008 someone started with a new template system which should be about as felxible as Smarty only fully written in PHP 5(.2.0+) to take advantage of PHP 5. That template system is named: Dwoo and it looks and works nice. Is about as fast or faster then smarty and way smaller.
Dwoo is gonna be the template engine that will be used in MageDB.

Framework for the database and other things
In here is a lot of choice as well. Most are heavy and bad but there are a few left over ones that are really worth to take a look at. Zend Framework and CakePHP. I find CakePHP interesting but kinda lacks clear documentation and the parts that i want to use are not stable yet. So the framework that’s gonna be in MageDB is Zend Framework. Now most of the things that are in that framework are useless for me and for that i will throw them out. Parts that i will certainly use are:
- Cache
- Config
- Db
- Log
and probably a few others as well.

Now that thats cleared up.

Now for the internal structure of MageDB. When i started MageDB to long ago i had the idea of making everything module based. Back then it was impossible for me to do just that. Right now it’s hard but possible. Everything i’ve made up until now for MageDB will simply be thrown away and will be made again in a modular way. The idea is that you can plugin modules that could change the full ineer workings of MageDB. You can actually change everyhing that i make with the modules. The core of MageDB will exist of a solid (i hope) plugin structure. The MageDB that i will release will just have a few default modules installed. For example there will be a module for:
- Category’s
- Files
- Viewall
- Download
- Rating
- Comments
and so on. Every single MageDB feature besides it’s absolute core will be coded in modules.

Now where is the benifit for you?
Imagine you want to have a verry light MageDB version and only want to have:
- Category’s
- Files
- Download

Now you can simply disable the other modules and they won’t be in the php code thus making your code faster for apache because it’s smaller. It’s not something you switch on/off with a if/else statement. You completely disable all the code that is providing the feature. You could (to save space) remove all unneeded module files if you want (wouldn’t recomment that). Another major benefit is the modding of MageDB. If you make a module of your own you can make it a lot simpler then to dig through the code, find what needs to be changed and change it. There is another big improvement for the one that wants to install the module. NO code changes at all! simply upload the module files, enable the module, perhaps set some settings in the admin panel and your done without seeing one line of code.

Talking about easy for the user ^_^ You users get way to spoiled with this MageDB once it’s done.

Yet another thing that’s gonna be different then from my previous development of MageDB. back then i required you to use Firefox and it could work under IE7. In the meantime of the last update and this one i’ve learned a hell lot more about css and can now make designs that work fine under IE5 and up and all other browsers. I intend to let the default MageDB theme be the same as you all have seen before only then rebuild from scratch and to support IE5+ and as little images as possible to keep it as light as possible.

By default there will also be support for extensive Captcha’s (reCaptcha) for registration purposes and there will be detault support for Askimet for anti spam purposes. Down side of those 2 is that the both require you to register at there site to get your own personal keys to use on your site. Luckaly it’s all free.

And ofcause default friendly url’s using mod_rewrite ^_^

Now the biggest disadvantage:
Required PHP 5.2.0 or higher
along with a few other requirements.

That is the biggest issue with MageDB. There are still so many PHP 4.x.x servers out there. I will ignore them all! This script simply needs PHP 5 and nothing less. Don’t worry about the technical details for this.. it will all be taken care for you when you install MageDB.

And for a estemated release date.. This time i do promiss that it’s gona be this year! And i make that promiss because i really want MageDB to be released now.

I will also try to post atleast once a week here with new updates for MageDB.
I hope my next post can have images to show the progress of MageDB..

That’s enough info for now.
Till next blog

I’ve been quite silent about any new MageDB updates so here is a MageDB future update.
When i started with MageDB i had just enough knowledge to make it all fit together. Now (about a year later) i have so much more knowledge on how things should actually be done and so much better idea’s than are currently implanted in MageDB that i don’t see any reason to continue to develop the current development version. The current version is build for PHP 4.4.x which was a mistake to begin with. I knew that it wasn’t how it should be but when i started the majority of the hosts where still using that old php version. By now PHP 4 is nearly EOL (End Of Life) and the hosts will have to move up to php 5.x.x so that’s another point to stop with the current development versions.

So.. is MageDB ever gonna see the light?
Yes.. sometime it will.
For now the current (php 4 based) project is dead. I will probably start all over again in PHP 5 with real object orientation in MageDB (possible in php 4 as well) and with functions that are simply better for the performance that are in php since version 5.x.x. And i’m completely gonna drop Template Lite and perhaps replace it by SithTemplate (PHP 5 OOP Template engine) . I will also make use (or partially) of the Zend Framework or i will make classes for myself with the same functionality.

This new php 5 based version will also have something that i (stupidly) left out of the current development version because i didn’t know exactly how to do it.  Now i know how to do it so now i will use it. I’m talking about plugin capability.

So,
Now that you are up 2 date with the development.
And for a release date: WID (When It’s Done) ^_^

That’s it for now
Mark

I’ve been quite busy the past few months.. actually since i started with a new study and since than the MageDB development almost stopped. I do some things with it but that’s just minor compared to when i started with the development (almost a year ago now). The expectations for a finished MageDB product don’t look that good.. it will be done sometime but it will also take about 10 times longer than i originally thought. Now i am not gonna make guesses anymore for final releases. it will just be released when it’s good enough to be released.

Oke now about: “MageDB Orange” i didn’t do nothing with MageDB in the last few weeks. I tried to make a start with a MageDB phpBB 3 integration and it’s looking good so far. I did came into a little problems with the MageDB theme in phpBB because i didn’t want to make the theme (in phpBB) exactly the same as phpBB itself and making it in the MageDB theme didn’t really fit well.. so i made it orange and that looks quite good! Here is a screenshot of how it looks.

I hope you like that orange look.
Now the idea for that look is done but the coding is far from it (like usual).. what you see now is hard coded in phpbb without any MageDB coding behind it.

And now for Christmas!

I hope you all have a nice Marry Christmas!

Till next blog,
Mark

I was just wondering how MageDB would perform in requests compared with paFileDB in the ab (apache benchmark) test.
The line i used to benchmark it was (on linux): ab -k -n 10000 -c 25 FULL_URL

And this is the resultset that got returned:

MageDB
Server Software:        Apache/2.2.6
Server Hostname:        magedb.mage.nl
Server Port:            80

Document Path:          /index.php
Document Length:        9153 bytes

Concurrency Level:      25
Time taken for tests:   20.304753 seconds
Complete requests:      10000
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Keep-Alive requests:    0
Total transferred:      93249324 bytes
HTML transferred:       91539153 bytes
Requests per second:    492.50 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       50.762 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       2.030 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          4484.81 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        0    1   4.9      0      53
Processing:     6   48  12.9     48     166
Waiting:        0   43  12.0     44     144
Total:         11   50  13.2     49     166

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50%     49
66%     54
75%     57
80%     60
90%     66
95%     72
98%     80
99%     86
100%    166 (longest request)

paFileDB
Server Software:        Apache/2.2.6
Server Hostname:        pafiledb.mage.nl
Server Port:            80

Document Path:          /index.php
Document Length:        2808 bytes

Concurrency Level:      25
Time taken for tests:   26.865887 seconds
Complete requests:      10000
Failed requests:        939
(Connect: 0, Length: 939, Exceptions: 0)
Write errors:           0
Keep-Alive requests:    9921
Total transferred:      30375321 bytes
HTML transferred:       28078949 bytes
Requests per second:    372.22 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       67.165 [ms] (mean)
Time per request:       2.687 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests)
Transfer rate:          1104.11 [Kbytes/sec] received

Connection Times (ms)
min  mean[+/-sd] median   max
Connect:        0    0   0.1      0       4
Processing:     4   66  22.3     65     434
Waiting:        0   66  22.2     65     434
Total:          4   66  22.4     65     436

Percentage of the requests served within a certain time (ms)
50%     65
66%     70
75%     75
80%     78
90%     85
95%     89
98%     95
99%    101
100%    436 (longest request)

Now both databases where about empty. The MageDB database had a few entries and the paFileDB db had 0 entries.
I think this clearly gives a picture how MageDB will scale on a website. The requests that can be handled by apache if magedb was run: 492 and for pafiledb it’s 372. Now a simple calculation:
492 / 372 = 1.32 which is 132% which is a 32% performance improvement compared to paFileDB.
It actually means that MageDB performs about 32% better/faster than paFileDB.

And i’ve also benched the following 2:
phpMyAdmin:      160 req/sec (which is what i expected of that slow script)
phpBB RC7:        20 req/sec (i would have expected more from phpbb)
phpBB RC7:        39 req/sec (this is with GZip Compression)

Now i’m kinda shocked by those numbers. i did expect MageDB to be faster than paFileDB but i wasn’t expectingthose low request numbers of both scripts. I’ve also run a benchmark on a basic html and a basic php page that both only display: “Hello World!” and that turned out that html only was able to get about 10000 request/second (which is 2000% better than MageDB) and the php benchmark was about 7000 requests/second (which is still 1400% better than MageDB). And that’s what was bothering me. So that means that both php scripts are still very inefficient. My goal is to get MageDB to be able to get about 2000 requests/second on my computer (all benchmarks are from my computer) and i believe that’s possible. 2000 request means that it:
 - Over 4 times better performing than the current MageDB alpha
 - Over 5 times better performing than the current pafileDB 3.6

I’m also amayzed that paFileDB (for a finished and proven script) performs so bad! It looks like there biggest advantage (template system) is not working out as a performance advantage. MageDB has about the same issue but is just lighter in general.

Now you might find those numbers interesting. But here is what is really interesting for you.
If can manage to get those request numbers up the way i want it than it means the following for you (all compared to paFileDB):o
- Your apache server can handle more requests
- You will be less likely to get a message of your host that indicates that your using up too much cpu resources
- The page will be generated faster
- IF output buffer compressing (php.ini setting) is turned on than it will “download faster” (the download is just smaller than)
- if your site has 2000 requests a second it means that either a lot just get ignored because apache can only do 372 with pafiledb or that you need about 6 servers just to serve the pages. with MageDB all the requests would be completed (no losses) on just 1 server
- It’s really could save you money

a lot of advantages. and i can’t think of any disadvantages at this moment.
Seems like i have a lot of improvements to do!

That’s it for now,
Mark.

The progress for MageDB is currently going nowhere fast. I’m just to bussy with school.
I did just found a nice new addition for MageDB that will make the more exotic languages possible. UTF-8 is gonna help with that. the script: http://phputf8.sourceforge.net/ is most likely the script that i’m gonna use to support UFT-8 without the need to wait for PHP 6. I might take the CakePHP UTF-8 script but that’s in development at this moment while the link i just posted here is about complete. This does add about 30KB in the compressed MageDB package and about 130KB in the extracted package.. o well it’s all to be as widely usable as possible.

That’s it for now
Mark.

A while ago i wrote about a cache system for magedb called MageFlexibleCache. Back than i didn’t know (much) about the CakePHP library. There current stable release doesn’t have that many caching capabilities but there new alpha (around for a few months now) has caching capabilities for all the cache engines that i wanted to support under MageDB (APC, XCache and File cache. CakePHP even has 2 others) so i was just wondering why i would have to make my own if it’s already there and under free (MIT) license as well. So nothing prevents me from using that cache stuff of CakePHP (and perhaps some other files as well).

So the newly created MageFlexibleCache was fun while it lasted.. if i can use that CakePHP cache stuff than i will use that (even PHP 4 compatible!!).

Now you probably find this boring because you don’t give a **** about caching.. you just want MageDB up and running.
Well.. here is a small list of the advantages that it gives you when i use that cache stuff.

Advantages
1. The site will load a lot faster in general
2. Queries can be saved a lot as long as nothing changes (one change and the cache will be rebuild for that part of the page)
3. The user experience will be a lot better than in a script that’s not using caching at all
4. Your server is capable of handing more requests because it’s mostly serving precompiled web pages (nearly no php and mysql).

Disadvantages
1. The script is getting a lot more complicated so making modules/addons for it will be complicated as well.
2. MageDB is making use of Ajax and that could give a few irritating issues

I can’t think of more disadvantages that a user might see..

So all in all the caching capabilities are good for MageDB and will be used.
Now i’m off to work on the (Experimental) Karma Rating script.

btw MageDB is really making some good progress these days.

Cya next blog,
Mark.

I wanted to generate the SEO url’s on the fly without having to refresh the page so what would you use for that. JavaScript is perfect for that. And the Ajax method is finishing it.

Here is the link to the video (decent quality and NO youtube anymore):
VIDEO 2 (really is misspelled: “realy”)

And the first video again but than not from youtube:
VIDEO 1

Have fun watching,
Mark.

Do i need to say more?
Oke.. than a few things about it. this is just the progress of the last few days and the amount of Ajax that you see in this video is not as much as i would like so that’s gonna change a lot. but this is just to give you a idea how nice MageDB is gonna get.

Till next time,
Mark.

I’m thinking of making a whole new kind of rating system for MageDB. mainly what you have to do now to rate a file is click on a star and it’s rated but perhaps that’s not the best method now is it? perhaps a good rating can be a lot better by looking at the number of visits, download and comments on a file. And it could go alot deeper than that. for example.. i could expand the system to allow users to rate comments as well (like: Gread comment, Good comment, Decent comment, Poor comment and Bad comment) and than take that rating in account when calculating the total rating of a certain file.

To put it simple. the basic idea behind this is to rate files based on there statistics and not based on the users opinion. The side effect (and also added advantage) of this is that all files will get rated sooner or later. Just visit it and the script will do the rest.
So what do you think of this?

I have no idea if this is gonna work but if it is than i’m most likely the first one with this idea. now i just have to make it a reality and make it work!

and feel free to DIGG this “idea”

Thanx,
Mark.

Almost every day i read the news on:
UniverseToday.com
and
Tweakers.net

but both have recently (few months ago) added some more banners. Enough banners to make the reading of news a pain in the ass so i wanted to make a script that downloads there news, puts it in a clean layout and shows it to me. Universe News Indexer is exactly that. Those sites only have there selves to thank for my “news ripper”.. if they didn’t added those annoying flash and gif banners and just would have been happy with Google ads than i wouldn’t have found the need to make this script. But i do realize that my script might not be completely legal because it’s just ripping the news and displaying it somewhere else. O well.. i didn’t remove the credits.

UNI provides the news of those sites without any ads at all.. i just strip them all out.
UNI currently only has those 2 sites but i want to add the ability to add more sites.. you can read all the whiches for UNI 1.0 here:
UNI Beta 1.0 wishes

Now the site itself:
UNI.Mageprojects.com

Have fun reading the news and please be kind enough to provide me with feedback for the site and mail me the sites you would like to see indexed. Send the suggestions to: markg85@gmail.com

That’s it for now. No MageDB news (except that the layout of UNI is about the same as MageDB only than in div’s only. NO TABLES (which magedb still has))
Till next blog,
Mark.

I just wanted to show a Admin Panel image so here it is: (right click -> view image)

now the links in the right part are way out of alignment and not even correct anymore. The part that is oke is the left menu and the layout around it. The left menu also has a nice ajax animation in the left menu but you can’t see that at this moment ^_^.

Slight hint: alpha 1 (0.1.0) is coming closer. and i might put online a perview on: magedb.mageprojects.com within a few days.

Till next post,
Mark

Like i said a few days ago.. i’m not happy with the memory and file usage of ADOdb Lite and making 2 simple modules added 80kB to the memory usage!! so now i’ve just made my own database wrapper which at this moment only supports MySQL (no i or SQlite). The wrapper will (of cause) be extended with a MySQLi extension and likely a SQlite extension as well. PostgreSQL is also possible.

MageDatabaseWrapper is a new script and it uses some php tricks that i hardly understand (just never used them before) so it might be revised completely is a future MageDB version.. perhaps even before the first final gets released.

Now the interesting results.
With ADOdb Lite the memory usage was around the 600kB (main site on a database with about 8000 files).
Wite MageDatabaseWrapper the memory usage is: 440kB (also the main site with the 8000 files).
That is a big difference!

Now Template Lite is still bothering me as well so i gotta take a look at that one now.

Update: The MySQLi plugin is now completed as well and seems to be working fine.

That’s it for now.
Mark

A while ago i’ve written here that it was unlikely that the module system would get into MageDB because i simply didn’t know how to write it. After days of testing and help of some people (someone even wrote a sample module system) i finally have the ability to make such systems. Now that this isn’t a issue anymore some parts of MageDB will make a good profit out of it. So in case you didn’t got it yet. There is gonna be a module system in MageDB and it’s gonna be on the database system and perhaps some other parts as well.

I’ve also experimented a little with a flexible caching system (MageFlexibleCache : mageflexiblecache.mageprojects.com) and nearly completed it in just a few hours. it does need some fine tuning. this is how it’s currently working:

$cache = new MageFlexibleCache;
if ($cache->LoadCache(“MyExpensiveEcho”))
{
echo $cache->loadedcache;
}
else
{
$cache->Start(“MyExpensiveEcho”);

for ($i = 1; $i <= 10; $i++)
{
echo “The time is: ” . time() . “\n”;
}

$cache->End();
}

And this is working. It now first checks if a certain part is in a cache and if it is than it will load the cache, if it aint than it will just run the php code and put it in a .cache file so it will load it from the cache the next time. All that is need to be done in this caching is making it smart.. but in order to do that i need to make the code around the caching smart and leave the cache about the same. Things like this could be in MageDB 1.0.0 otherwise it’s gonna be somewhere in the MageDB 1.x.0 releases. This caching will make MageDB alot faster and way more query friendly than my current MageDB or any other file database script (paFileDB ).

And than there is the ADOdb Lite library. lets put it simple. it’s still to big for my taste and uses to much memory. i’m gonna make my own db wrapper with the module system that i just made. Initially i will make modules for MySQL and MySQLi so (hint hint) this will most likely mean that MageDB is gonna work on MySQL and MySQLi and i hope to make SQLite and PostgreSQL modules in later versions. I think i might release this db wrapper as well as: MageDatabaseWrapper(?) (magedatabasewrapper.mageprojects.com).

Than there is the (still) bulky Template Lite template engine. i think that it’s also to big for what i want to do with it. going the way of phpBB would be fine for me + i need it to be able to exclude certain parts in the templates (like i posted 1 or 2 posts ago).. i don’t really know if i’m gonna:
1. Modify Template Lite to my needs
2. Leave it the way it is.. (means no smart caching for MageDB (yet))
3. Drop Template Lite and make my own of this as well and perhaps call it: “MageTemplateEngine” (and : magetemplateengine.mageprojects.com)

Than last but not least.. the progress on MageDB itself at this moment.
I did do a few things but it are only layout changes. not any php coding. The public part is getting close to be done. The admin part and personal control panel are still not done (admin panel needs rewrite, personal control panel needs some bindings and more options) once the admin cp, the personal cp and the public part are either done or good enough to use than MageDB 0.1.0 Alpha will be released to the public. This release won’t have all the ajax goodies i promised earlier nor will it have all the features but than again it isn’t final as well.

I expect to release 5 alphas, 3 beta, 1 rc and 1 final

// Everything can change here
MageDB 0.1.0 = Alpha 1
MageDB 0.2.0 = Alpha 2
MageDB 0.3.0 = Alpha 3
MageDB 0.4.0 = Alpha 4
MageDB 0.5.0 = Alpha 5

// A lot can change but no major changes (ex: other them or new name etc..)
MageDB 0.6.0 = Beta 1
MageDB 0.7.0 = Beta 2
MageDB 0.8.0 = Beta 3

// This release will only feature bug fixes
MageDB 0.9.0 = RC 1

// If No bugs are found in RC 1 than this is mainly RC 1 with some cleaned code. otherwise the bugs from RC 1 are fixed in here and be released as Final.
MageDB 1.0.0 = Final version 1.0.0

That’s is for this (_long_) blog post.
Till next post.

I was just looking through the Zend Framework and found that very interesting.
They do things in there that could be very useful for MageDB. The thing i’m interested in mostly (for now) is the zend caching feature. IT could help me alot to avoid using queries at all. Oke.. that needs some clarifycation right?

With the current MageDB build i’m not caching anything at all and thus making magedb a relative heavy script (it needs to do big php loops all the time and grab big database query’s) with the template system that i currently use (Template Lite) i can use caching options but not how i want it. with template lite you can: “set the caching to true and set a timeout” that’s not handy to use for a file database script because it might change a lot. With Zend Cache i can start the cache on any part of the page i want, look if a existing cache file is there of that part and load it. that’s way more flexible than Template Lite and it’s still small (137.0 KB for the Zend Cache framework). So now i have the idea to cache everything on MageDB and making the cache somewhat “intelligent” and by that i mean that it’s still checking for any database changes and if it finds that than it will rebuild the page and put it in the cache. This all seems like a good idea to me and i might use it. But sadly this has a big disadvantage as well. the caching stuff might be way more flexible than Template Lite his caching capabilities but that’s about it. it doesn’t support templates at all… so either Template Lite is gonna be deleted from MageDB and i start using (and make a small own template system) or i expand template lite a bit to have better caching capabilities…. both options are tempting to me. and both options will make MageDB alot faster because it doesn’t have to run heavy query’s or heavy php loops all the time..

In the end i might even choose to keep it the way it is and make this in a MageDB 1.x.0 release or even 2.0.0
If you have any thoughts about it (if anyone is even reading this) please tell me.

Update:
I just found out that Zend Framework requires PHP 5. now that isn’t a problem for me but it is for the majority of the (future) web administrators because the majority of the hosts are still using PHP 4.4.x and not PHP 5.x.x and i want to make MageDB 1.x.x available for PHP 4.4.x so therefore i cannot use Zend in the first MageDB release series. Perhaps CakePHP? o well.. you will see it when it’s released.

Update 2:
Oke new info on the caching part.
CakePHP does seem to be able to do what i want with caching although it doesn’t have a clear manual about that part.. so i might give CakePHP a try on the caching part but i might as well write a caching system myself… here is a sample of something that i need to be able to do with the caching system:

<cache start>
code…
[...]
<cache interrupt>
[...]
code that doesn’t need to be cached
should be here…
[...]
<cache resume>
[...]
other code that’s cached
[...]
<cache interrupt>
[...]
o wait.. we need to get this out of the cache as well
[...]
<cache resume>
[...]
the last parts of the page
[...]
<cache end>

Something like that could be very likely needed in MageDB and Template Lite isn’t offering that. Smarty is offering it partly and Zend Engine is offering is… CakePHP seems to offer it partly.

Mark.

I’ve just finished the navbar.class.php file that takes care of the navigation that will be always visible in MageDB.
This navbar class was hard to make while the code isn’t long at all.. just hard to make. The navbar is finished and fully implemanted in the public part of MageDB (not in the admin panel, yet)

Another thing that i’ve just finished is the “filecount class” this might also seems like a stupid little class but is quite useful. I assume you would like to see how many files there are in a certain category… this class takes care of it and it counts recursive (meaning that it’s also counting all the sub categories).

The above additions make the public MageDB part progress at about 70% i think. Those 2 where the most difficult to make.

Next 1. : SEO friendly urls
Next 2. : adding the admin panel (doesn’t mean that it’s completed).

And i’m gonna experiment some with Modules. will probably be very and won’t be in MageDB 1.0.0 but it’s the main new thing for MageDB 2.0.0

Till next blog,

Mark

AdoDB Lite
MageDB is using AdoDB Lite as database wrapper but sadly had some strange behaviors.
I had to create 2 modules (3 new functions) to solve those problems.
It where my first modules ever for any script and i’m happy that they worked out well.

Recursion
Recursion is a very handy “trick” to walk through a bunch of category’s (db entries) at once but is hard to do.
I finally made recursion the good way and can now apply it where it’s needed (mainly the navigation bar and the file count).

Till next update.
Mark.

Original pasted here: http://forum.mageprojects.com/magedb-adodb-lite-made-ready-for-magedb-and-recursion-t11.html

Recently i haven’t been posting alot of new MageDB stuff so i post some extra good stuff today.
The MageDB design has been altered a little because i though it would fit the current idea behind MageDB the best (which is simple, good, fast and easy to use without much/any junk around it).

From the looks of the screenshots below you might think that MageDB is about to be done but that’s sadly not true. I’ve rewritten MageDB because it was already getting a mess so now i will have to do the admin panel all over again as well. The public part (what you see in all the screenshots) is probably about 35% done.

Screenshot 1 – Nothing special. just the main view of MageDB with it’s wonderful clean looking layout.

Screenshot 2 – Once you click on one of the items in Screenshot 1 you will see this

Screenshot 3 – This is the first one where you see Ajax in action. The blue bar is drawn there with the help of ajax and in there you will get the detailed information of a file. those boxes can be opened/closed by clicking on the middle “Other” button. (assuming you run MageDB which you don’t have ^_^) MageDB will use alot more of those tricks.

Screenshot 4 – Here you see the file view with all it’s details. As you can see it’s all still a little plain in here because i need to finish the scripts behind it but you can see the idea. You also see the Comments number in collapsed form. The next screenshot shows it in expanded form

Screenshot 5 – Here you see another nice Ajax trick. The comments are being grabbed from the database when you click: “Show Comments” (visable in previous screenshot) which than expands the comments and changes show comments to “Hide Comments”. Fancy huh. more of this will go in MageDB.

Screenshot 6 – Here you see the My Options panel. it’s quite plain at this moment because there isn’t much in it but that will change. Currently this page only serves as a dummy page because the edit links aren’t even working.. i want something there that isn’t existing yet in javascript tricks (remote edit in place – initiate the edit in place when you click “Edit” .. and that has to be made.)

That’s it for now.
Cya next time.

Since a few days i`m acive in making a new theme for Fedora 8.
The purpose of that theme is to be the default theme for both KDE and Gnome for when Fedora 8 is being released (which is in about 5 months).

You can see the latest drafts here:

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-art-list/2007-June/msg00092.html

And the latest draft image (made today) is this:

http://img263.imageshack.us/img263/1186/kdebattlewip6lf8.png

but i`m posting new drafts everyday (sometimes multiple on a day) so keep an eye open on that thread on Fedora-art-list

About MageDB.The progress of that is gonna go fast now and expect a release (alpha or beta) somewhere this month.

Thanx for reeding,
Mark.

As you might have noticed i changed the MageDB theme here. this theme also “fits” the new magedb theme which i will show to you in the future when it`s fully sliced and working in all browsers.

That`s it for the theme. Now for the “roadmap”.

Roadmap:

- Fase 1 – Designing and slicing
- Fase 2 – Coding the admin panel (+ client side stuff like AJAX)
- Fase 3 – Coding the user interface (+ client side stuff like AJAX)
- Fase 4 – Release MageDB 1.0.0
- Fase 5 – Fix magedb bugs if any and add new experimental features (MageDB 1.x.x series)
- Fase 6 – Recode MageDB in a modular way. MageDB itself will be tiny here
- Fase 7 – Create all the modules for MageDB
- Fase 8 – Release MageDB 2.0.0. Support for MageDB 1.0.0 will stop here. EOL for 1.x.x
- Fase 9 – Release upgrades for the MageDB modules. + bug fixes
- Fase 10 – MageDB Core should be finished and secure. updates for it will be in the 2.0.x range. major updates will be in 2.x.0.

Roadmap Details:

Fase 1:

In this fase i will design everything for MageDB in photoshop and slice it till it’s working in the web browsers. and i will try to get it working in Internet Explorer aswell.

Fase 1 will also have some coding in it.. that coding is just the html+css+ajax stuff that the layout will have.

Fase 2:

Fase 2 will probably take a long while to complete. I will have to make a good functioning admin panel with highly advanced user permissions that also need to work together with atleast a dozen forums. Besides that the coding must be fast, stable and ofcause of good quality.

Fase 3:

This fase will also take a while and will mostly require alot fine tuning for performance and ofcause adding in all funny AJAX stuff.

Fase 4:

This fase will be major for me personal. This release will be a bulky MageDB release with ALOT of features in it. There might be a few beta releases in Fase 2 and 3. This fase might start with Release candidates.

Fase 5:

This fase will contain mostly new features that i would like to test out and bug fixes ofcaouse. bug fixes will be done like this in the version: “MageDB 1.0.x(0 till as much as needed)”. New features will be done like this in the version: “MageDB 1.x.0″. All new stuff that could be added will (ofcause) be in a very stable state.

Fase 6:

This fase will be the biggest one of all. the layout of MageDB is likely the only thing that will remain the same. The rest will all be rewritten in a modular way. MageDB itself will be a tiny script here and you (the end user) will have the ability to import modules. The admin panel will require alot changes aswell.. the major advantage of a modular system is that the core system will be fast and tiny and the user who is gonna install MageDB on his site will have the ability to just include whatever module he wants. This fase will likely have serveral beta releases aswell.

Fase 7:

As soon as fase 6 is completed all the modules will have to be created. This step is likely to be done partly in Fase 6. i have to test it with something ^_^ This fase might require alot time aswell.

Fase 8:

When fase 7 is finally done and all previous fases aswell (obvious) than i`m finally here at the point of Fase 8. This is the point where my original idea for MageDB was before i even started making it. GHere MageDB will be a modular script and verry easy to use. Also very easy to add modules in.

Fase 9:

When i`m finally here the version stuff of MageDB won`t go as fast anymore. The core should be done and stable and only the modules should get updates. The modules are depending on the Core so when i change the core the modules are likely to require changes aswell. It all depends on my programming quality when i`m here.

Fase 10:

i just wanted 10 fases. I don`t have big idea`s for here.

That`s it for the roadmap at this moment.
You must be wondering how far i am at this moment.
Here is some progress for all the fases:

Fase 1: 99% Completed
Fase 2: 5% Completed
Fase 3: 0% Completed
Fase 4: 0% Completed
Fase 5: 0% Completed
Fase 6: 0% Completed
Fase 7: 0% Completed
Fase 8: 0% Completed
Fase 9: 0% Completed
Fase 10: 0% Completed

That`s is for now.
The next post will have the screenshots of the progress.

i was just looking through some jQuery plugins and i found a few very nice plugins.

i thing that all the following plugins will make there way in MageDB:

- http://digitalbush.com/projects/masked-input-plugin (good for keys or fields that require a certain length)

- http://john.jquery.com/plugins/rating/ (wonderful rating system!!  will need to be edited a little)

- http://www.trendskitchens.co.nz/jquery/contextmenu/ (hotmail has a context menu on right click. perhaps it`s a good idea to add something simulair to MageDB aswell?)

- http://stilbuero.de/jquery/thickbox_reloaded/ (good for images…)

- http://stilbuero.de/jquery/tabs/index.html#fragment-1 (handy and uses ajax. bug effective enough for MageDB? depends on where i put it)

- http://cherne.net/brian/resources/jquery.hoverIntent.html (nice, but not sure if i can use it anywhere)

and i`m looking at othe fancy things aswell.

the above are just the plugins that are likely to be preinstalled in magedb. those are by far not all the effects that will go in MageDB

Current MageDB progress is standing a little still.. just keep an eye open for this blog.

Mark.

The code that you see above is the code that i will use (or just made actually) to check if extensions are loaded or not. atthis moment i`m checking for 14 extensions but it might get bigger (mbstring mightget in aswell). This check (actual checking code won`t be posted.. still working on that) isn`t causing anything bad for your magedb installation.. it will just inform you about the status of your MageDB and how you can improve the functionallity of MageDB. the users won`t notice a thing with this check.

The users WILL likely (you can turn that on/off) see a custom error message if GD and I(mage)magick are not enabled. this is because image gd/imagemagick is being used to generate the thumbnails on MageDB and without it you won`t see any images at all (unless you have choosen not to thumbnail the images or if there are thumbnails in the cache.

i will post some more on this checking and how it looks later on. also not that the above code isn`t done like the actual checking code but it`s just to give you a impression of what extensions are gonna be used with MageDB.

till next blog.

Mark.

some of you might know that i`m verry PRO php 5.2.x and that i hate it that alot of hosts still only offer php 4..

And to encourage you people to make the move to php to be able to use this script i willhave all the PHP 5 stuff in magedb by default and you will need to download special .php files to get MageDB running in php 4.

Lets just tell you some of the new things that i`m gonna use in php 5.

- Image Magick

- XMLReader

- XMLWriter

- APC (Alternative PHP Cache)

- Fileinfo

the above modules/extensions will be used in magedb. and the first 4 will be used ALOT (Fileinfo perhaps a little.. depends on where i could use it). and when you have php 5 you will have some nice speed improvements aswell because i don`t need to write entire classes to do something (for example the xml reading and writing) the unlucky php 4 fellows won`t have a hard time making the script working on php 4.. they probably will have that option during the installation, than the installer will download the patched files.

as of this moment i haven`t done much in magedb besides testing alot of different stuff so i`m afraid the release isn`t sooner than expected.. although the permissions system is getting somewhere.. (in sql code.. no php yet)

that`s it for now

till next blog.

first the ajax stuff.. look at this image:

the thing that is circled in red is currently done by AJAX. this means that if you change the enabled state it will be changed on the fly and a little message in the lower right corner will pop up and inform you that the settings have been applied. the same goos for the “X” cross (delete that row). when pressing that image (it`s the first image in the admin panel) you will get a confirmation box where you can choose between OK or Cancel. when ok is pressed the row will go away and the little information box in the lower right corner will pop up again (and fade away after a few seconds).

Now for the ImageShack implementation. recently i requested the implementation key of imageshack so that images can be uploaded to imageshack and thereby saving you expensive bandwidth… i`ve gotten the information i needed from imageshack and i can start implanting it but as if now it`s not implanted.. i haven`t done a thing with it besides looking at the coding. so for now ImageShack isn`t implanted in MageDB (at this mometi have no parts where it could be usefull to implant it).

And the Menu System..

well that system is causing me alot of PAIN…… in my brains.. i`ve tried so much with it (in combination with AJAX) and i`ve been bussy with it now for 3 days!! and i`m still not happy with the results..  o well.. it looks like the menu stuff is gonna be my playgroundwith ajax for the time being

till next blog.

That`s how the new menu management looks under Firefox.

That`s how it looks under Internet Explorer 6 with a javascript library that fixes alot of the bugs that microsoft left in IE6. with this javascript (with the name: IE7) you get real png tranparency, alot of css things will work how they should work and a ton of other things are FIXED when using that script. this also means that MageDB will not work (or is ugly) when you have javascript disabled.

And this ^ is how it looks without the javascript library that fixes what uncle bill didn`t want to fix..

so you all should use or atleast enable javascript when this MageDB is gonna be released.

Now for some other news.. if you looked at the images about you might have noticed: “Edit Menu`s” and well.. it is what it sais.. editing menu`s or adding menu`s.. forst i didn`t want to add this stuff to the database becuase it was my idea to have the menu`s just in the template pages.. but with the permission system that i`m gonna make for MageDB it`s gonna get verry hard to disable certain menu items without having them in a database. now it`s easyer to manage that and for the persons that are gonna write mods for magedb (if any) will be a gread advantage now they can just add a menu through the admin panel instead of editing the code.

MageDB ETA Release Date.
i`m not gonna say a date. i do say that it can be released sooner than previously thought (that was with a estimation of 3 more months from now on) but i didn`t counted in the next week.. which is completely free for me so i`m thinking about dedicating that week to the development of MageDB. but wou will all see the results of that here in the ammount of blog posts.

That`s it for now.
till next blog.

This Page Is Valid XHTML 1.1!

that`s the message that i get when i want to validat pages from my script which is a verry good thing.
All the current admin pages are XHTML 1.1 valid. the non admin pages haven`t been checked yet, but i think i will need to do some recoding there to make them valid.

It realy took me a long time to get all the admin stuff valid, but it`s worth it. Any person that is gonna use a clean version of MageDB without anything changed will have XHTML 1.1 valid pages.

Not much filedb script, if any, can say the same thing with XHTML.. if they have it it will most likely be 1.0 transitional

Now for the permission system. I think i will do it like this:
if anyone can help me with that.. it`s verry hard.

That`s it for now.
Till next blog.

i didn`t showed
you guys the cool javascript and ajax stuff that i`m gonna implant in MageDB but it`s gonna be awsome!.
so for example when you want to add or delete a upload field it will fade and roll in or out (depending on your action). Another gread thing will be the uploading itself and the uploading of images. The thumbnails of images will be created WHILE you add the file.
this will be done with some heavy ajax stuff and alot of php coding!! then when your done with adding the screenshot and the
script has made the thumbnails you will than have the option to: “Use” or “Don`d Use”/”Delete” it. for now you don`t have the
option to change the thumbnail size on the fly but perhaps in the future. The uploading itself will have a PROGRESS bar and
will also be done through javascript and ajax.

Now when you don`t have javascript or you disabled it fer security reasons the script will still work and you will still have all the options you had before.. just not the fancy ajax and javascript things.. i`m still thinking of how i will need to do that field adding part without javascript.. i think it`s gonna be a iframe.. so that i can refresh the page (part of the page) without you having to retype everything

want to see some javascript stuff? look here: http://interface.eyecon.ro/demo

And i did wanted to go with prototype first but prototype and it`s third party libraries seem to have some problems with opera (a browser that validated the acid 2 test so no problems should happen there) so therefore i started hunting on another library anf that was eather Moo.FX, dojo or jquery… and jquery seems so nice that i`m just going with them now. i will try and post a  movie about it soon (when i have something fancy to show)

That`s it for now.
till next blog.

Just check it out.
till next blog.

I`ve just finished the Database Backup script that will be used in the admin panel to create a database backup.  The script doesn`t have alot features besides just making a database “dump” file.

Features:

• Create database dump file
• Option to add a “IF NOT EXISTS” in the CREATE DATABASE line
• Option to disable the db entries dump (entries will also be dumped by default)
• it`s compatible with the phpMyAdmin query window (it`s actually based on a phpMyAdmin database dump)

I made this script because i could not find any decent dump script that was just making the dump without anything special.. my version will get way more advanced in time because i will also use this dump script in my phpMyAdmin alternative called LiteAdmin (i already registered that wordpress subdomain ) (liteadmin.wordpress.com will be unmaintained till version 1.0.0 of MageDB gets released).

there is not much more to announce at this moment.

Till next blog
Mark.

Here is the first update for MageDB.

i intend to make MageDB a clean lite script, but the admin panel will be
more advanced than i`ve ever done or modded.

Till next blog.

Over at the opera blog i said that i was looking for a blog site with a better url (better to remember)  and i think i found that in WordPress. WordPress is also a free open source program and that`s one thing that i like alot!!

So the MageDB Development news will be posted here from now on. This wordpress stuff is all pritty nice but i must admit that i will still need to find out some more things here.. (it`s all kinda new for me here) one thing i don`t like here is the font settings while writing this …

The first development post here about MageDB will be posted here shortly allong with some gread screenshots.

Till next blog..