Septuro

Earlier today, I killed the folder-restructure branch, merged back into trunk, and called it a day. The ‘element’ folder no longer exists, anywhere, and the plugin folder has been readjusted so each plugin is its own folder. When we first did the layout of Septuro, we created an element folder to house all of the PHP, broken down into sub sections like ‘objects’ and ‘modules’. After a few months… we realized we ONLY use objects and modules. So, we decided to do some retooling, eliminate the elements folder, and move objects and modules to the top level.

Now that I am done with this, I will be working on the form plugin. I’m doing this on the trunk, since the current application/plugin set up makes it easy to build new things without interfering with others. The folder restructuring would’ve messed with others quite a bit, so I had to do that on a branch.

This form plugin is going to be really, really cool. I can’t rant and rave about it enough. It’s a great idea that will smooth out form creation, validation and processing into a few simple steps, even supporting multi page forms that require session or cookie data to be stored.

Speaking of sessions, while making this form, I’ll be working on a new session object, alongside the database object and xml object, to store object data in session variables as its system of persistent storage. Like the other object-storage layers, it will handle everything without interfering with the first or third tiers.

I’ll post more on it as it comes along, since this will be a hefty project.

Recently, Phil and I were looking at a new system that he is developing for Septuro – where the autoload cascades across the application, parent applications, plugins and finally onto the system core. This is a really cool system that lets you override existing objects with new objects, or even extend existing modules. It is taking the concept of object oriented programming in a new direction, and applying those concepts to entire file structures.

While working on this, we noticed that the plugin directory wasn’t structured in the ideal way, and while looking at the folder structure, we also finally decided to do what Phil has long suggested – kill the element folder and relocate its contents into an object and module folder. I created a new branch today – folder-restructure – where I will be doing all of this tweaking. This really is a pain, but better to do it now than deal with the pain of it later.

I should have this branch finished and reintegrated into the trunk before the end of the day, and then I can get back onto working on the long awaited form plugin. That plugin is going to be really, really cool. I’m excited to get down into working on it. It takes my previous work on the dataTemplates and abstract objects and puts them in a new light. An object can be converted into a form really easily. Just tell the form what object it is working with, the object already contains information on how to be displayed in a form, plus it’s validation rules, and then give it a callback function to execute on completion – it’ll be sweet.