It's been a busy month. I'm wondering if I shouldn't cut out a little playtime (I endeavor to keep a healthy balance between work and play) to devote more time to content, here for the site. With Comic Con quickly approaching, I'll have to, in order to produce more artwork. However, there were a few more urgent things I needed to do, with regards to mochaCMS, to improve its quality and polish, before finally developing a generic template, crafting the installation pdf, and letting it loose on the public.

Changelog:

1. A new, better-designed, tabbed interface for the Control Panel. My first goal was, as usual, to make it work, and solidly. And it did! That was as a basic list of forms, with additional pages provided for capabilities reserved for root and admin users. Now, this has been replaced with tabs crafted in CSS and using (mostly) unobtrusive javascript. As per usual, there's one set of javascript for the DOM-compliant crowd and another for Internet Exploder, to keep the code per browser lean and efficient as possible.

2. A Downloads module offering both public and private areas, to offer a main area with downloads available for all visitors, and a password-secured area for private clients and the like, making the CMS better suited to professionals who may want to use their website for day-to-day business purposes (sharing project files, etc). Files for download are added via the Control Panel.

Now, I know what you're thinking when you first read the description for a downloads module, especially one offering a secured login area, and I can assure you, piracy wasn't even part of the equation. The idea was prompted by a freelance illustration project I recently completed, for which the image file was too large for email. I reckoned giving my client the convenience of logging into the site to download the file not only solved the problem, it preempted the need to set up an independent FTP server, which would have been a slower protocol, anyway. I also thought end users would appreciate having the same convenience. Additionally, it brings mocha closer to my end goal of making it a 'collaborative' CMS, whereby different parties running mocha for their websites can network and collaborate with others who are also using mocha, complete with the ability to chat, message, share calendars and track projects.

3. Email notification for comments, which is something I had planned from the beginning. I wasn't certain of when I would implement this feature, as I was deciding on the best way how, but a recent issue spurred me to bring it to the forefront and get it done. Despite my whopping 143 visitors (sarcasm), someone decided to leave spam with a porn link on one of my journal entries. I probably caught it a few days late. That won't happen again. Now, whenever a comment is posted, anywhere the comment module may be in use on the site, an email is sent to the user and/or administrator with the comment, the URL of the page on which it appears, and the name and email address of the visitor. I've currently implemented this by having the mochaComments talk to mochaContact, which uses the Javamail API, but I may change this in the future, so there's no reliance between the two modules. I did it this way for now, in order to add the functionality while keeping redundancy in code, as well as the resource footprint, to a minimum. Maybe in the next iteration I'll move the core of mochaContact into the common utilities area, allowing me to eliminate some code altogether, as well as make the functionality available for possible future modules with little or no fuss for the programmer.

Now, what's left before public release (which is being done open-source, under a GPLv3 license) is to design the core theme and put together a basic instructional PDF. I'm thinking two weeks, max, to finish both of those... but we know how development cycles go ;o)

Hopefully, once this thing is released into the wild, I can bring a few more developers on board, which should shorten time between releases and additions to functionality. It looks like there may currently be a commercial project in the works which wants use of the same moniker as my project (they recently renewed the .com domain, while I own the .org, .net, and .us domains), but I definitely plan on rolling out before they do, in order to lock in the trademark. Then, hopefully, I can snag .com, as well.