Resuming The Work

[David]

UTI is only a web forum right now and a temporay web page. I think it's important that we get the website up and running before the TI-community and our members despair
Anyway, has anyone started with the website construction. I see that AlienCC using his Zabotage CMS as the temporary frontpage. Question: is this supposed to be the new UTI site? If so, when is it fully functional?

I also have some PHP codebase for the UTI website. I have begun with the back-end (admin area). The two things I have finished are the membership management and file-archiving. What is left is basically

• News management (this one shouldn't require that much time)
  
• Articles/FAQ database
  
• Website link archive (this one is easy as well)
  
• Project management (may take some time to complete)
  
• Program archive stats.
  

Now I wonder what plans Jon and the rest of the board of directors have.

[NETWizz]

I was amazingly board this summer, so I learned PHP and MySQL by setting up Php 4.3.2 and MySQL 4.x, and I now have a good understanding of both PHP and perl. I then looked at the format of this forum, and found that much of it is very simple.

Example, if you look at this topic, it is 644.

index.php?showtopic=644

Does something like:
SELECT * from IBFposts WHERE topic_id='644' ORDER BY pid

I got made a killer login script this summer. In PHP.

It handles authentication to the next level!

*128 encrypted passwords (unbreakable even if someone can SELECT the info from the DB)

*encrypted session # that are guaranteed unique

*simple session id i.e. 7
*Makes for simple access

*IP stamp
*Stolen Cookies won't work

*Browser and OS detection (gets a string)
*Would likely prevent IP spoofing with stolen cookie

*Time Stamp (unix style works great for simple calulation)
*Limited time session forced by server if the browser doesn't drop the cookie, the server will stop accepting it after a short time anyway

*Keeps track of last click made by user
*Can display users active in admin area in last 15minutes...
*If a user has a 1 hour session but does not do anything for 15 minutes, we can assume inactivity and end the session on the server

*Can keep track of where the user is
*Simply put a number in an SQL query colum each time a user clicks a link

*Makes cookie wo/expiracy date so closing the browser tells browser to delete the cookie.

[AlienCC]

[NETWizz]

And maybe I could help too.

BTW, David,

You can also write your code in PHP if you choose sience you can still get input, connect to the databases, process requests, and print html to the browser.

We could have both.

[David]

Okay, I finally accessed the Zabotage admin area and explored it. It has never been my intention to scrap it, but I kindly propose we should build a customized CMS for United TI, preferably in PHP - just because there are more who know PHP than Perl, which makes delegation of the task easier, hopefully the site will be finished sooner because of that. Or on the other hand, as Justin B said, it is possible to mix PHP and Perl, providing that we have a clearly defined database structure.

A questions for the admins; what language(s) do you know (PHP/Perl), and which do you prefer to program in? Also, how much time can you spend developing?
Evidently, I prefer PHP. Right now, there ain't much time for programming, but I expect to have my hands free in approximately two-three weeks.

Any opinions or comments?

[NETWizz]

PHP sounds good to me.

We can do it in PHP. I will ask Jon to upgrade PHP tonight.

[AlienCC]

No need to upgrade php at this time, the conflicts between php and mysql have been resolved by my upgrading mysql yesterday.

Cheers.

--AlienCC

[NETWizz]

Thank You much, Jon.

-Jbirk

[AlienCC]

Has anyone else been doing much with the website?
I sure haven't.

--AlienCC

[NETWizz]

I believe David has been doing some.

[AlienCC]

Just a small reminder to everyone here that UTI is a year old now. David was working on the mainpage, but it seems as though it will be impossible for him to finish it, and we still don't have his codebase.

[Arcane Wizard]

When the part of Zabotage that handles the skin is finished (or is it already) and we have a winning logo I could make a skin to match the logo, or maybe a bunch so people can choose.

[AlienCC]

The part that handles skins / themes is mostly done, with minor tweaking left. Of course as I add stuff like the new version of the download code, I will be making a few changes to some of how it works now. That aside, aking a theme for United TI really is kind of dependant on the logo in order to tie everything together, and make it feel like it belongs.

Little bit of an update on development:

* News management (known as articles in my code, fully implemented, minus the user comment system, which will come in some more time)
* Articles/FAQ database (known solely as FAQs in my code, fully implemented, but not well tested.)

* Website link archive (not implemented yet)
* Project management (this will tie into the download code I previously had, and will utilize a specialized pluggin for UTI that I will be working on soon)
* Program archive stats. (this again ties into the download code, but not specific to the UTI Pluggin)

There is still a lot of work to be done, and much of it is not listed here. My deadline of 2 months should be hit so long as I don't get any contract work, but if I do it takes priority.

--AlienCC