It's been over a year now since I last posted, and that really is a poor track record. I have to say though that with recent events and the new release that just went live I am more than happy with the results. ccoder.co.uk has had a huge face lift and now implements a fully functional forum (that actually works) as well as well featured toolset for the back end, so in the coming months you will see content being added all the time !!!

Now that the core functionality is up and running I can start to spend time working towards the XNA project more proactively, I have built a model based on how I see the solution fitting together and would really love to see some discussion about this in the forum in the near future.

And finally, just in case their are any problems with the forum / sign up process drop an email to admin@ccoder.co.uk and i'll get that fixed ASAP.

I started a new job recently and the transition from role to role hasn't been too bad so far. Since things have been a little easy going due to my new employer wanting to "let me down easy" of the sheer scale of my new role I have had a little time to look at a few things. Many of you that know me have been asking about the progress of the XNA project and if i'm totally honest it hasn't really moved at all.

I have however had some interesting feedback from the contractor I am taking over from in my new role about approaching Meta data and ways to handle it. At the moment I cache meta data for every page so that generating page menus and things is made efficient bu the data is stored as a tree that represents the actual structure of ccoder.co.uk. I think that in reflection it is probably wiser to save the meta data as a flat list that can be pulled by a "key" (the page id).

The code change is minimal and I feel worth it in the long run so i plan to roll it out as part of the next release of ccoder. I just wish my javascript skills were a little stronger now as the editor functionality is proving to be somewhat complicated. Good job I enjoy a challenge I suppose.

Talking to a few of you over on the CT forums i figured you guys might appreciate a small service you can play with. There's nothing too special about it with the main method calls allowing you to post messages to other users of ccoder.co.uk and retrieve the messages sent to you.

I will be adding a members list soon (this is already built but for "admin" use only) so you can choose from a list of member ID's to send messages to (you can even send to yourself in case you want to test something). I will extend this over time to add more general functions like a "feedback" call so you can suggest improvements or features.

I have been thinking about ways to implment a page roles system that allows roles / groups of users to be dynamically assigned to pages as "editors". Now that ccoder.co.uk has a reasonable back end I have a need for a backend that allows for a very fine granular control over all aspects of an entire web site.

I guess the main sticking point is identifying weather the data that associates a user with a page should be stored locally to the page, in the user store, or in it's own store. I have wondered about what what impact this has on a content management system and what role this data should be playing within it.

I think that because I use custom authentication objects I can use the "user id" for the current logged in user as a sort of unique id for passing all requests for secure data. The user id is in a standard guid format and should not cause any conflicts in the system but what happens if a substantial change is made to the page structuring ? and what happens to instructions carried out by means of an api call ? This is a complex question that would likely only be answered accurately through trial and error.

Someone briefly mentioned to me last week that ccoders news feed wasn't exactly great when imported in to outlook, so i thought i'd have a look. It turns out that all that appears is a link saying "View article ..." and not the actualy news item. "How peculiar" i thought, so i set about finding out what the problem was and it turns out that outlook (and i qoute on this one from more than one very reputable source) "finds really simple syndication not simple enough to understand", someone at Microsoft abviously wasn't paying attention that day.

For the time being I'm happy leaving the rss format I'm using the way it is, I would recommend feeding the url "http://www.ccoder.co.uk/news.xml" to either some other reader or browse to it using your favourite browser IE and firefox do not appear to break the feed format.

Why couldn't they leave it how it was ? This did clearly work in 2003 !!!

A few friends pointed out to me recently that the login and signup functionality has been at best "predictably horrible", by that I mean that I have been using some standard .NET controls to handle things like signing up and password reminders. Sorry about this guys but trying to do everything myself from day 1 would of course slow me down considerably so this is really more of a "placeholder" type of technique that I'm using to get things up and running.
I have fixed a few of the issues but the signup and login process is not exactly great at giving informative feedback as to why it might have failed at times saying something simple like "your registration could not be completed", not exactly a wealth of information there. I will replace these sometime but have chosen to focus on the back end.

I have added better link / trail handling so that pages have meaningful names so an old link might be "http://www.ccoder.co.uk/Default.aspx?Page=8" and the new is now "http://www.ccoder.co.uk/Projects.aspx" this should help with search engines as well as make the system a little more "user friendly".

I have hit a bit of a brick wall over managing the contents of iframes (used by the editor). When creating new pages or editing pages the system switches the page to an editable view where the editable areas are loaded in to iframes, the problem is how to manage the size of the iframe dynamically as the iframe could contain any contant area and the content could be any size. The other problem is working out how to tell the body of the document the irame contains to fit the size of its containing iframe ... i'm not exactly on speaking terms with iframes at the moment over this ... we just agree to disagree on almost everything !!!

I made good progress today with the administration and editor functionality. Much of it is API call related so not much by way of visual elements on the site. I have been suprised so far at how easy building a content management system has been, though not being much of a designer find that making things look nice is a pain and often very time consuming.

I figured to get round this i might consider some pallete based controls that let you pick a base colour and select other related colours on your behalf as "suggestions" this sort of thing could be useful for a stylesheet builder tool in the long run.

Handling pages is now pretty simple in the back end and although many tools are available at the moment these are either small "quick fixes" or simple ajax controls. To continue to drive the CMS in the right direction the key place to start from is to wire the back end up to some of the front end features developed by my friend over at VectorLight.net.

Having examined such controls i have however become a little suspicious about how ready the technology is for the real world. Silverlight is nutoriously complex to setup because not all versions of the current client are compatible with code written in the other. Some serious considerations on deployment of such an application will need to be made but i think that Microsoft may help clear such issues up in the future. Getting in to the technology so soon will make our products here part of a cutting edge community.

• The most obvious being the lack of functionality, i'm working on this. The plan is to get to a point where you guys decide what stays and goes on a feature by feature basis.
• The forum, reply counts where listed will always show "0" at the moment, sorry about this i'm looking in to it (something i forgot to tie to the back end).
• When posting on the forum you may find that the editor window centres the text you type. This is part of the back end "page editor" functionality i'm still working on.
• Page statistics (see to the right) peculiar data being returned. I have identified that this is simply because earlier pages created before the fields were added show the default values, with dates it's the first of jan 0001 (woops - the site can't be that old !!)

My apologies to those who signed up wanting to get posting on the forum right away, the site has now been repaired along with a few other bugs (minor). I had some unforseen issues with the host, the server came very secure and the default permissions did allow users to make changes to the files on the servers file system.

This another key feature of the new CMS, the forum functionality is far from complete but does take advantage of the back end within the CMS that uses no database to manage the web site, threads are basically treated like content pages and therefore will have all that is required (in the future) by a content page.

Personally i take this to be a major advantage as forums generally stand alone as some separate entity in a web site rather than becoming an integral part of the site thus adding value to it.

ccoder is now working with vectorlight.net to build a bigger tool set that can be used throughout the site. The old project explorer tool used to crawl through projects is being replaced with a new silverlight driven component that is currently at the core of our content management system. Such components mean that progression should be much faster than in the past allowing us to use neat tricks like inline editing of page content on the fly with nothing more than the simple click of a button.

This is an exciting time for us as it represents the start of a key new phase in the development of the community. With such an improvement in our back end technology we hope to begin attracting users needing much more than a little code advice. We are hoping that by making such huge improvements in the toolset here at ccoder we can reach even the most shy of computer users.