Chugging Along
Chugging along.
Made a lot of progress this weekend, but it's always two steps forward, one step to the side.
Multicolumn flow of the main text has officially been abandoned. It didn't really make enough sense to implement, given the hair-pulling challenges involved in working around the various "float" bugs found in css browsers.
Note: PHP is not an OOP language, by any stretch. Sure, it has support for OOD, with classes and all, but it doesn't really lend itself well to that sort of approach in any rigorous sort of way.
Current issue: I want to list in sidenavs the "current" sources and subjects of article headlines showing up on the main portal pages. The trick is, my original design called for them to display in reverse chrono order. I.e., the subject of the most recently posted article, of any type, would be at the top of the "current subjects" nav, and so on. Of course, duplicate subjects should not be displayed. I've just managed to work out how to accomplish this, but I'm a bit concerned about performance. For such a small feature, the code and database calls required to implement it seem excessive, even with the pseudo-dynamic publishing approach I'm taking. Now I'm starting to wonder why this feature needs to behave the way I originally designed it.
The problem is, I almost abandoned this approach during the design phase, but then ended up deciding that it really was necessary for a not-so-obvious reason. I made no note anywhere of that tricky reason, though, and I can't recall it right now. <*sigh*>
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Made a lot of progress this weekend, but it's always two steps forward, one step to the side.
Multicolumn flow of the main text has officially been abandoned. It didn't really make enough sense to implement, given the hair-pulling challenges involved in working around the various "float" bugs found in css browsers.
Note: PHP is not an OOP language, by any stretch. Sure, it has support for OOD, with classes and all, but it doesn't really lend itself well to that sort of approach in any rigorous sort of way.
Current issue: I want to list in sidenavs the "current" sources and subjects of article headlines showing up on the main portal pages. The trick is, my original design called for them to display in reverse chrono order. I.e., the subject of the most recently posted article, of any type, would be at the top of the "current subjects" nav, and so on. Of course, duplicate subjects should not be displayed. I've just managed to work out how to accomplish this, but I'm a bit concerned about performance. For such a small feature, the code and database calls required to implement it seem excessive, even with the pseudo-dynamic publishing approach I'm taking. Now I'm starting to wonder why this feature needs to behave the way I originally designed it.
The problem is, I almost abandoned this approach during the design phase, but then ended up deciding that it really was necessary for a not-so-obvious reason. I made no note anywhere of that tricky reason, though, and I can't recall it right now. <*sigh*>
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