The Flu, Graphics Magick & DMS features MERRY CHRISTMAS!

I seem to get sick around every second Christmas. One year I'm fine, and the next year I manage to come down with the ugly flu that everyone else has gotten over just in time to enjoy Christmas, and I end up stuck on my couch wrapped up in a blanket taking vitamins and drinking 10 cups of tea a day. This year isn't so bad, but I did feel like crap for 3 days. Just tonight I am finally starting to feel better after a few hours in Dayle's hot tub. My apologies to everyone I cancelled plans with, or did not show for tentative drop-ins. I just couldn't handle it as I really needed the sleep.

Well during my sick time, I managed to screw up my sleeping schedule tragically. So in one of the 2 hour sections I was awake, and feeling shitty enough to be up, but wish I was asleep, I decided to do something semi-productive. I had been working on getting a personal website up for Thom. I had taken his site down on the sick somputers from the last week. Maybe I caught whatever those hard drives had? Anyways I decided to port the old site to the new phpfwk. It was a little bit of work to move to a new user system, which ties into the CMS, DMS etc. Base everything on templates, and a common framework location. I managed to move everything around, and create a single SQL file to run on the DB which would alter tables, and add everything we need.

This site in particular makes use of the photo album cmsObject I wrote quite some time ago. There were a couple of new features in the phpfwk version, which was cool. I did realize that the new server I installed was missing the imagick extension. I checked and / or installed, Image Magick, php-devel, and any other related packages from the distribution RPMs. I downloaded the imagick tar ball, ran phpize, ran ./configure. The configure failed stating it can't find InitializeMagick in -lMagick. Huh?!?! I found the .so, ran strings, linked it to other logical spots, checked the ld.so.conf, ran ldconfig, did all the usual things. I spent around an hour trying to get configure to run. No dice. I was also not lucky enough to have a .so built on SuSE 9.1 work on 9.2 :-( The end fix was that I installed Graphics Magick from source, and passed --with-imagick-gm flag to force Graphics Magick as the back end. Everything configured, compiled, installed, and worked perfectly. Another trick to put in my blue bag with the purple stars on it.

Tonight I was feeling more up to the task of doing something 3/4 productive. I decided to familiarize myself with the DMS code from the framework. I'll need a DMS for the L&Y toolkit. I'm heavily leaning towards using the existing DMS, and extending it to be more useable for L&Y needs. I think I can make the DMS totally extendable, and not wreck anything in there. I'm still rolling some things around in my head.

I did add a couple of needed features right off the bat:

1. Allowing the creation of sub-folders
2. Allowing the deletion of folders (all sub folders too)

I totally made the code look pretty. Well not really pretty, just workable. No disrespect meant to Aaron's coding, we were really really pressed for time when we first worked on this code base. I think he wrote the DMS in about 2-3 days IIRC. It has served it's purpose for the time we have used it. It just happens that I want to use it for some more, and while I'm in there I may as well make it look nice.

Some things I have planned for the future of DMS

1. Allowing reparenting of folders and documents
2. Creating a post action system (post folder / doc creation, post deletion, etc.)
3. ACLs and FTS are listed inside the files as TODOS still (I might need these, low priority at the moment though)
4. Add a DMS selector to the RTE (Maybe add the new RTE at this time, again low priority at this moment)
5. Maybe redesign the on disk file layout (with sub folders now) ???

I'm sure I have some more things kicking around in my brain. It's kind of clouded tonight as I'm getting over the flu. I think I am on my way back to healthy, so I can get at this DMS stuff. I'm excited. Not so excited about the -26 Celius predicted High for Monday. At least I'll get to stay inside and code all day. ;-)
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