In my last post I talked about the Artists Website Software I was planning.
It’s been a busy few months (both with my day-job and with moving house) but I have made some progress, and I hope to have an alpha version available in the new year. At that point I’ll probably upload everything to SourceForge to take advantage of their tools for Open Source projects (hosting, CVS and bug tracking).
I’ve been coding the project using object-orientated PHP5. As well as being easier to maintain, this also makes the code easier to extend. It does mean that it won’t work on an old PHP4 installation – but from what I can see most hosting companies offer PHP5 as standard now, so hopefully that won’t be a problem.
I’m avoiding using various (potentially time-saving) PHP PEAR Extensions even though I have them installed on my server – mainly because I want this software to be usable on a standard PHP5 installation which doesn’t have PEAR. Similarly, this means I have to eschew MySQL Stored Procedures in favour of SELECT queries, as many webhosts don’t allow their users access to Stored Procedures.
As soon as the alpha version is ready I’ll be looking for people who have some spare server space where they can install and test it. At this stage the preferred testers would be people with a strong technical (PHP/MySQL) background as the alpha testing will very much centre around the security and optimisation of the PHP code.