Still moving along...

Thursday, 10 February 2011 13:35

I owe you an update. Things are still rolling along slowly but surely. I am still alive and I don't plan on abandoning this project or anything like that. In fact I have just set up a really nice new issue tracking system and hooked that into my SVN system. Things are a little more streamlined and much nicer now for development purposes. There is a Report an issue link on the menu along the side to report issues at the new tracker. Please report any bugs, feature requests or enhancements there.

It has been about a year since I have taken on this project and I definitely hoped to have something released by now. But, that's life, and that's free GPL software. It will be ready when it's ready and the only thing you can do about that is give me a whole bunch of money so I don't have to work for anyone else and can dedicate all my time to this software. I have ran into various issues here and there. So I am patching the existing code up for all the bugs and requests people are reporting and will release a version 2.1 soon.

Originally I was just going to directly port everything into a framework such as Joomla. I even started making a Joomla component for it. I realize that any new system should probably have some way of migrating existing sites into it. And as I worked on all of that I discovered that perhaps Joomla is not the thing to be using for all of this. Maybe there is something better. So I explored various frameworks. I searched and explored far and wide, across the vast internet, from site to site, page to page, link to link. I tried Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, CakePHP, Kohana, Yii, ModX, Xoops, and practically any other PHP framework or CMS you can think of. In the end I never really found anything I think would suit MDS properly. So I will just have to use MDS. It will be undergoing a major transformation.

So that's why I have now decided just to proceed as is. Expect a 2.1 release soon which should tighten security, and fix various bugs and a bunch of other things. I expect to hopefully have a 2.1 release out in the next month or so which will hopefully fix all bugs reported. But that's being hopeful and as we know reality might tell an entirely different story.

In the future I hope to get it all into a framework of it's own if nothing better comes along by then. It will be all OOP, MVC, extensible, web 2.0 etc, etc, etc. When? Eventually.

Another thing, lately a bunch of people have been wanting to make bigger grids. The problem is that processing a bigger image in PHP takes more memory. If your system doesn't have enough memory, simply make multiple grids, edit the example.html file and add the HTML code from the grids. You can do this all in the Admin area.

And finally, I have been getting more and more people asking to talk on the phone. Sorry but I really don't have time to talk on the phone to everyone. Please, everyone, stop trying to talk to me on the phone. I am sure you are nice and not crazy at all. Sorry, but I don't want to talk on the phone to everyone, or even anyone. I want to code and I want to multi-task. I have like 50 windows open at any given time. Talking on the phone demands all of my attention while I am on the phone. So unless you want to pay me  $20/minute to talk on the phone, up-front, I don't want to talk to you on the phone. I am not trying to be mean, but please, please, use email or post in the forum or on the tracker and I will give you my time when I have it.

OK, that is that. Feel free to post any suggestions on frameworks to check out. I hope they have image editing/management capabilities. Perhaps soon when more browsers and devices support it we can just use HTML5 canvas or something.

A little update

Friday, 20 August 2010 14:59

I figured I should post a little update about what's going on around here instead of keeping things in suspense so long.

First of all, I just posted a link to the SVN snapshot.  It is a direct link to the SVN and will create a snapshot of the 2.1 branch which contains updates since I started working on this script.  It will also contain any future updates I make to that branch but I have been focusing on the 3.0 release.  I haven't made any changes in the 2.1 branch for, well 6 months it seems.  Wow, has it been that long already?  You can click here to check it out.

If anyone wants to update their 2.0.15 install you can probably do that.  You just have to upload the files over top of the old ones.  If you do that make sure to back things up first in case you accidentally overwrite something you didn't want to.  Don't say I didn't warn you!

As some of you reading this may know I have been working on converting the Million Dollar Script to Joomla.  This will be the 3.0 release.  Though I must admit I have been a little busy with getting married and whatnot.  That's where all that time went I think.  But when I can I've been working at converting it into Joomla 1.5 which is a very widely used Content Management System.  This should make managing your site a great deal easier and improve stability and security.

It is a fairly complex project to tackle as this script is quite full of features.  I have not been keeping it updated on the SVN either since there isn't much to see yet but I will work on that soon so anyone interested can see whats going on and keep updated.  Right now what I have done doesn't really do anything like the original script.  It is merely a base install of a few Joomla extensions in a nice little package.  I have to add some code from the original script into it now and get it all working properly.  Pretty exciting stuff!

I have been working on other projects to pay the bills and some are even helping to advance this script a little bit so thanks to everyone who helps out in every way.  Thank you to everyone who reports bugs and to those who wait patiently for the Joomla version.  It will be done in time.  When?  Whenever it gets done is all I can really say.  I had hoped to have it done by now but things don't always work out as planned.  Hopefully before the end of the year.

Ryan

New Website!

Thursday, 22 April 2010 04:47

Today is an important day.  It is the first step towards an improved Million Dollar Script.  The new Million Dollar Script website is finally ready!

This website will allow you to sign up and ask for help in the community forums, post comments, make suggestions, report bugs and errors and more.  By participating in the website and the community you can help to improve the script and make it better for everyone who wants to sell pixels from a website.

The Million Dollar Script was recently passed to a new coordinator. I will be updating this script, fixing reported issues, and improving security and stability. A new website was launched and you can expect a new and improved release of MDS in the near future.

Ryan