07/10/2008 05:00:00
As indicated in the title, the next version of the Presentation Engine application that powers this site has been released for download. The download version is Beta 1. While I was planning on not offering a public download until Beta 2, not enough changes have been required since Beta 1 to require that the version be incremented. A few tiny bugs have been fixed here and there since I began dogfooding the new version here. In addition to that, the only new feature is that the "Quote of the Day" functionality has returned. I have also decided to scrap the forum feature from previous versions. It was never used on this site and it just didn't seem that it was worth the effort to recode if neither I nor my handful of visitors was interested in making use of it.
Remember version 3.5 is a total from scratch rewrite of the application. The only things kept around were the database itself. The urls are formatted the same way, but every single line of code within the app has been reworked. The previous 3.x versions were VB.NET ASP 1.1 applications. 3.5 is a C# ASP.NET 2.0 application.
The entire site is now built using CSS stylesheets. There are no more table layouts. The code used in the two themes I have created for the site now are 100% compatible with Internet Explorer 7.0, Firefox 2.0 and the current public build of Safari for Windows/Mac.
Themes are based around a single pre-constructed CSS stylesheet and it's associated images. The CSV files and the auto-generated CSS files are gone forever.
The caching back end has been totally reworked. Instead of caching the whole database to a set of temporary XML files, a persistent on-demand cache is now maintained across application executions. This caching system is far more automated than the previous one and allows for simple deletion of existing caches once an associated piece of data changes. This is still highly experimental as it has not been 100% tested, but appears to work quite well.
All of the admin tools have had their UIs updated from "majorly retarded" to "reasonably designed" UIs. Yes I can actually design a decent UI for working with the data on this site. This release proves it.
Most of the functionality of this site is routed through an ASP.NET Update Panel which for the most part prevents full page postbacks allowing for a smoother end user experience.
All custom pagination of record lists have been replaced by the ASP.NET Gridview control and it's built in pagination. This makes for a much more pleasant and consistent user experience and also allowed me to remove a nice chunk of backend code dedicated to supporting this functionality.
Selecting a theme will now set a cookie for the next 30 days that will use that theme the next time you visit the site by default.
All application database files will now be stored in the App_Data. This was a good move given that this now prevents the MDB files from being download should the folder and the file name both be known. The XML data caches are also stored in this location.
All application settings are now stored in XML .config files per ASP.NET standards. No more settings.asp file!
No changes have been made to the backend database structure. This means that transitioning from one system to the other is quite simple.
Quote of the Day functionality has been reworked so that it is far less clunky in it's implementation. A simple link on the front page of the app now displays. Once clicked, a previously hidden div displays. Once the link is clicked again the div disappears. The text within the link can be modified by changing the application settings.
Built in functionality to allow for easy printing of any page on a Presentation Engine site has been provided. A new button labeled "Print" by default has been added to the sidebar. As with all buttons on the sidebar, the text can be modified by changing the application settings.
It is now possible to create themes for the Presentation Engine that allow users with custom DPI settings to scale the website correctly. Unforunately a theme that does this is not provided as part of the default distribution, but a sample of this can be seen on my site using the theme, li-black. However, keep in mind that due to CSS 2 limitations, it is currently not possible to create a fully scalable theme in a standards compliant manner if you insist on using images to tile elements on the site (such as I do in my default theme here or in the distribution). The reason is that typically these images are displayed as background images within a style. No provision is currently provided within CSS 2 to allow these images to scale correctly to match a users DPI settings. It is possible that individual browsers can handle this on their own (I believe IE seems to) but there are no guarantees. Long story short: The current spec for CSS 3 provides for this functionality, but it'll probably be a cold day in hell before it gets ratified and shows up in an actual browser that people give a shit about.
Well now, wasn't that fun? Anyway feel free to download the source code, which is now available on my project page for the Presentation Engine. If you find any bugs, send them along.