Speckled Green

More for me, rather than anyone else, I’m going to be writing up a roadmap of what I plan to have included in Repose. I’m quite sure that, with school and all that, especially as I approach the hardest part of my schooling life, that none of this will happen in the time frame I would like it to, and as such making a roadmap is rather silly… but still, I’d like to plan it out for myself so I don’t get overwhelmed with what I’m trying to do. As they say, one step at a time, eh?

Repose – The Roadmap and its features

Ohk Ant!! So, this is what you would like to have in the finished version (2.0+)

• Clean, simple design. Probably staying roughly the same to the current one
  • Improved header with background
  • Comments are nicely formatted and laid out
  • Pages don’t just look like overgrown posts
  • Author page template
  • 404 Error pages
  • Fully updated PHP, conforming to the new WordPress 3.0 API
    • Or even 3.5 or 4.0 or whatever it is by the time I’m ‘finished’
  • Adoption of several new ideas I like
    • About the author at end of post
    • List still growing
• Introduction, refinement of and expansion of AJAX built into the theme (think of K2 as a role model to start with)
  • AJAX page loads for browsing through posts (or queries)
    • First up, loading just normal posts, no search, no full post view, just the index
    • Stepping up, the full post views with their comments attached
    • Thirdly, search queries browsing. Kinda linked to the above two.
  • AJAX comments
    • AJAX posting of comments
    • AJAX posting & refreshing/loading of new comments
    • AJAX preview of comments
    • Yes, I know there are plugins for these, but none of them ever seem to work, so I must integrate these into my own theme with my own coding (years of pain ahead of me…)
  • AJAX login (at least for comment posting)
    • Once again, while plugins could do this, none seem to work
• Refinement of code
  • Streamlining and refining my xHTML, (or even HTML5?) and CSS
  • Optimising my Javascript and AJAX scripts
    • Utilising jQuery may help there
  • Optimising my PHP and related WordPress functions
• Development of compact, workable and attractive mobile version of the theme

I plan on reaching this final idea I’ve outlined above by the time I’m into version 2.0. However, I admit that this is an awfully long time away, and I will definitely not be able to do all of that in one release. Hence, I will incrementally update (like most open source projects adding new features or upgrading old things), slowly adding new or improved things in each official release.

I plan to have the easy stuff out by the time I’ve finished my HSC. In other words, topline dot point 1 (clean, simple design…). If I magically learn how to do AJAX and make it work with the ever changing WordPress before then, then I’ll slowly try to implement each feature in the order outlined above.

Taking into account how slowly I work, and the workload ahead of me (due to my procrastination, school’s workload and the such), the following timeline is a conservative estimate of when I expect to finish things. To anyone else reading this: These are goals I am setting myself, at no point expect them to ever really be achieved on time. I will check them off like a ‘what to pack’ checklist as I finally achieve them.

• December 2010: Author template paged added. 404 error page added. (v1.0.5)
• December 2010: CSS to replace excessive background images on site. More usage of CSS3 features of browsers to increase visual appeal without bloating theme size (v1.1.0)
• January 2011: Improved header finalised and completed. Comments layout completed. Addition of ‘about author’ to posts completed. Final transition (for time being) to current API (v1.2.0)
• November 2011: set up of template for AJAX script (v1.2.1)
• January 2012: First AJAX script fully working – doesn’t have to be pretty. (v1.3.0)
• June 2012: Page load AJAX scripts completed and implemented. (v1.5.0)
• August 2012: Cleaned up scripts and made them pretty (jQuery most likely). (v1.5.2)
• October 2012: Preliminary AJAX comment posting script ready. Prototype AJAX comments script ready. (v1.6.0)
• December 2012: Implementing AJAX comments script. (v1.7.0)
• February 2013: All AJAX scripts in working order. Theme layout finalised. Transitions and pretty effects in use. (v1.8.0)
• May 2013: Optimisation and clean up of code complete. Official release of 2.0, hopefully. (v2.0.0)

I expect there will be a lot more ‘sub versions’ as I try to build this theme to my goals outlined above. Sounds kinda like the Mozilla 2.0 engine: always said to be coming, but never any work appears to be done on it. Firefox is always on Mozilla 1.9.x, like how it’s Mac OSX ‘something’ (version numbers 10.x)… and they had the gall to claim Windows 7 was only and upgrade of Vista… no, I still haven’t got over that marketing bluff from Apple. BTW, I don’t really have anything against Apple, they’re a wonderful company who’s pushing boundaries and trying out everything and being stylish about it. I just don’t like the crazy ideas of Steve Jobs, or the prominence of the weird Apple users. But this argument has nothing to do with the roadmap, so I’ll stop.