Well, I finally got Eclipse set back up with git support. Pushed a few changes to github. Have been working on a major namespace overhaul on the framework and now Fedora has updated Eclipse. I can't seem to get egit to update and even the PHP code editing seems broken. Guess I'm going to try NetBeans. Its time like these I miss Windows and PSPad, but hopefully temporarily.

As I finish setting up the repos and testing the latest ClayCMS code, I'll be updating this site and launching the Clay Project site. I may do a full refresh of this site, depending how badly an upgrade goes (this is a very early version of ClayCMS). Its the first big test of my upgrade code, so I'm going to try the upgrade regardless. If the blog becomes emptier in the coming weeks, then you know what happened :)

I've begun the project and repo changes on github, you can find them on http://github.com/clay. Sorry, I don't have links enabled since I haven't pushed the new blog app to the site yet. What I've done is create 2 new repos, clay-framework and clay-installer. These repos will be mostly for developers who do not use all of Clay. I haven't updates the clay repo on github.com yet, the old one is still there. What I'll be doing is keeping the repos updated individually, pushing and pulling updates as they come and merges. More repos are coming, but the main idea is to use the clay repo as a pool and merging changes into. The individual repos will allow transitions to come more smoothly and provide SDKs or a sort to developers. The hope from using all of these repos is to provide branches that go from slim to full to accommodate different needs for developers and users. Clay will end up being a suite that offers the functionality of the more stable packages and user contributions. My current contribution is ClayCMS, which is a package and libraries that offer content management features and applications.

After swapping development environments, losing almost 6 months work of Clay development code due to a combination of backups being auto saved to the wrong partition and the following hard drive failure (development code and backups were on the same drive, mistakenly), being away for a month, and some really busy work weeks, Clay is getting back in full swing. I'm going to work around the code losses and try to remember the changes as I push forward. I'm also setting up a private cloud on my hosted server and will be doing a reset of the git repository on github, with mirrors on sourceforge or google code. I messed up and didn't push a lot of changes to github because of the transitions the code was going through. I'm working on a repo strategy to divide up the project, probably resulting in up to 4 different repos to support the full Clay project. I've been wanting to do that for a while, it should allow me to have the framework separate and branch it in a way that will allow continued advancement. Tomorrow i hope to get new repos setup and possibly do some more organizing, but that depends on how much time I end up with.

I really only have a few small things left and I can upgrade ClayCMS on this site. The dashboard is my favorite new addition and the services functionality is going to be a killer feature to promote ClayCMS. Once the upgrade is here I can finish the Clay Autoboot package and begin launching multi sites. Then Clay will finally have a project web site and maybe it can see a little community growth. I have lots of ideas that will hopefully provide some inspiration for community projects with Clay.

As the Summer here in the Great North winds down, I've been itching to get back into developer mode. I have several Clay-based projects I want to work on. I'm hoping to launch the clay-project.com website soon, with some nice project management features, including hosting for Clay-based projects. The site will use ClayCMS. I'm also planning on a relaunch of BeSquishy.com, starting out with a bookmark service and later expanding to a suite of more social oriented applications. My goal is to one day promote Clay for commercial applications as a free open source platform, so I have a few projects I want to launch on that front as well. Two of the projects I've blueprinted a little are a maintenance data system (for managing equipment and operational scheduling and workflows) and an online education system for distance learning. That may sound like a strange combination, but coming from a military background, they are actually tightly linked if you consider a maintenance environment. There are so many things I want to do and so little time. Fortunately Clay is stabilizing and I can focus on the fun stuff instead of writing apps for a system that wont support them in a few months. I think once that clay-project.com site is up and running you'll get a better idea of exactly how much I want to do with this platform I've spent so much time working on.

So, I have decided to try Fedora 15 for about a month. I've been using Ubuntu for about 3 years straight, time to try something different I think. I'm liking Fedora a lot, but haven't decided if I like Unity or Gnome Shell better. They both have their advantages I guess. Anyway, I've taken a little time off of Clay development. Its a busy time of the year and there's just too much going on. I will work on it as often as I can and now I have a new development environment to play with. I like Fedora better than Ubuntu so far.

Barksdale for a week. Sounds fun, right? It's probably not going to be...

Finally, for now, i've been considering setting up a mailbag like posting service in ClayCMS. I can use the service hooks, probably. I've been using Google+ with it's Picasa integration and email posting of pics. Very handy for someone like me without a smart phone.

I've been thinking about how to do a new theme for this site. The theme on here now is an example theme I've set up to standardize CSS and structural naming conventions. I want design something fun and more visually appealing for here, something a little more unique than what I normally use. Many I'll have time to play around with that this weekend too.

I hope to do a refresh of the site this weekend. I think the dashboard is close enough to completion to finish it up. I haven't worked on anything dealing with Clay in almost a month. There have been lots of things to work on around the house that I can't do during the winter months.

P.S. Sorry for the quiet second half of June. Also, I may have to do a refresh. It's looking like some of the coming changes will be a lot to push into an upgrade, especially considering this is the only site that will ever require this particular upgrade.

I'm still working on ClayCMS, slowly. I've been enjoying our short North Dakota summer a little too much to have enough free time for coding. I've also been studying to TSgt promotion for next year. I've been using a newly open sourced project called WebTester to help study. It is a testing (as in exams) script that lets me create practice tests. I have considered porting it over to ClayCMS, some day, and maybe working on some other educational apps.

I plan to release the first Alpha version of Clay next month. I still have quite a bit of work to do to reach the milestone, but I hope to at least begin to get Clay noticed a little. Clay's Installer uses apps in the form of packages, which represent releasable products based on Clay. ClayCMS is an example of an Installer package. Packages can also be utilities to supplement tasks within the Installer. One supplemental package I've worked on a little is a boot selector, which enables you to run different web sites from a single web root, using as many different packages as you want. When Clay loads up it is given a site name, which then triggers the boot for a specific package. Currently, if someone wanted to run multiple sites, we'd have to either use different PHP files for the entry point or different web roots. The boot selector acts as a go-between, providing the ability to use the Installer to choose which site boots to which package, and then hands over the boot to the desired package. I've only been able to do minimal testing, as it has been locally and not using domains, but there doesn't seem to be any performance hit from using the selector. It does mean an additional class is loaded, but the class methods only determine which package is to be loaded and then the normal boot process begins. I'm hoping the boot selector will encourage developers to create new projects based on Clay and utilize the Clay Installer.

Apparently I forgot to push the upgrade to blogs that fixes the max title length. Guess I'll have to work that one in too!

I am thinking about pushing a Clay upgrade before I move on to stage 2 of the service interfaces deployment. The upgrade would probably kill about a week of ClayCMS work, because of the amount of code changes required for the upgrade (not to mention testing). The upgrade is intended to fix a well-intentioned feature of Clay's application object, which has turned out to be kind of a pain. The intent was to provide a way to create application objects through a single function. Unfortunately I never finished implementing the full intent of the function and it just makes the code harder to read. When I made the function I wasn't using PHP 5.3 or namespaces. With namespaces there hasn't really been a need to use it, other than standardization. Anyway, using more application objects has made me want to drop it completely, but I didn't want to postpone stage 1 any further.

I'm mostly happy with the way the dashboard is coming along. It's been kind of difficult to keep it simple enough to mesh well with any site theme, but luckily that's what stylesheets and template overrides are good for. I have to say there is already a huge difference between trying to use this site and the one on my development machine. The dashboard makes working with the site a lot easier. I got a little carried away with some of my testing, so I'll have to go through and clean out some test code before uploading the changes. Maybe stage 1 will show up this week, if I have enough free time.

I'll be glad when stage 2 is live, so I can relax the filtering on these posts. Not to mention all of the other cool things it will bring with it. Stage 2 will allow services for applications such as hooks (plugins), filters, blocks, and events. The hooks allow things like comments on posts. The filters add security and allow applications to transform content. Blocks are mini applications such as menus and links. Events can do lots of things, such as hit counters, tracks users online, and site statistics. Stage 2 will allow lots of new features, unfortunately they will take some time to add all of them.

I've been testing/polishing a user dashboard application, which will be deployed with the first stage of the new services interface for ClayCMS. The premise is to provide an easily accessible control panel, which provides you with any options or features available to you on the site. It will be available on any page and open above the main content on a page. I've been working on the PHP side of things so much that I'm a little rusty on JavaScript, so it's taking me a little while to reacquaint myself with it. I'm trying to keep it simple in design, because I tend to make things a little more complicated than the average individual likes to deal with (according to my wife lol). Unfortunately I won't be enabling user registration at first. There are some security related features that won't be added until the second stage of deployment, so I'd rather not risk it. I have implemented registration, so it will be easy to enable once those security features are available. I'm really excited about the dashboard. I think it provides an administrative edge over many systems. It also scales to individual users, depending on what we are allowed to do on the site, so there is a single interface for everyone. That makes the site much easier to manage from an administrative side. I've considered allowing the option to create dashboards for specific roles (user groups), but I'll wait for user input on that.

I've made some improvements to Clay overall, during my prep for deploying the services platform. Nothing major, but I've fixed a few bugs and worked in some general code base tidying. More than likely I'll shift my focus to the Clay Framework libraries soon, as I do have a deadline approaching for a Beta release. I haven't decided if ClayCMS will make it into the first release. That mostly depends on how much time I have for quality testing.

I've been experimenting with the first stage of the services platform for ClayCMS. One of the tests I hope to actually deploy is a Dashboard/Control Panel, which is generated dynamically depending on installed applications and a user's privileges. Once I have the Dashboard up, I'll probably begin allowing a few users to register and test it out.

Today I've been married to my wife, Stanzi, for 5 years! I love you :)

I've decided to deploy the services features in a few different stages, in order to make sure they scale and I get the mash-up affect I'm looking for. The good news is that means some new apps will begin showing up sooner than they would have. It also means the development cycles will be stretched a little longer than I had wanted. After a lot of testing and scenarios, I think this will be the best approach for a solid base for development and maintenance.

I'll try again...

I obviously need to extend the session timeout to something a little longer. I typed a fairly lengthy post and ended up losing it because I waited to post it.

It's taken a little longer than I expected for new features to begin rolling out. I'm working on a core feature in Clay that would require some rewriting of applications if I push anything new through right now. The new core feature is a services interface, which can be used for utilities such as hooks, blocks, data objects, and other specialized applications. If you are familiar with Drupal or Xaraya, it is a mix between Nodes and Dynamic Data.

The bug was an issue with sessions expiring, which resulted in the session handler trying to create a new session, with the same session id (more like recreate the old one ;). I've had a fairly aggressive gc deleting old sessions, but once in a while there would be a strange error in my log file that didn't really tell me anything. The security enhancements yesterday added some intercepts that use the deny over allow methodology, including some privileged error messages. Because of those, I finally got a less cryptic error message and was able to track down the bug. Even if that wasn't the earlier bug, it's at least a dead bug :)

Finally.. I think. There has been a session bug that has been bugging me (yup) for the last 2 months, roughly. It would show up, then go away, just when I thought it was a fluke, it would come back again! Well it showed up again today. So I've spent most of my free time today trying to zap it. I uploaded a potential fix...it went away. Hopefully it's squashed and I can finally concentrate on something a little more interesting.

Maybe I'll leave the date in the same place and just move the time. Whatever..options are good.

The timeline may look better when there's more than one user posting though... I'll have to play with it when I have time.

Well, this timeline order for blog posts was kind of cool when I imagined it, now it's looking kind of lame. Guess I'll have to do some tweaking when I get back around to working on the blog app. Maybe a "choose your layout" option?

I did get around to uploading some changes, but they were some bug fixes and some security enhancements. I haven't uploaded any new apps yet. I missed some important features on the administrative side, so I've been having to implement those. Now that those are in place, I'm hoping to begin trickling in some new additions.

Hopefully I'll be uploading a few changes later today. Haven't finished as much as I'd hoped, but something is better than nothing I guess.

Ah the Fail Whale (Twitter)... how I hadn't missed you.

Well, now that I've resolved the server issues, which were actually not server issues at all, I have a new plan for this week. I think I'll mainly focus on finishing this blog app (which requires some finishing touches to the HTML filter), along with adding some user details with a user profile app (nothing fancy). Other than that, will probably work on some behind the scenes stuff.

Apparently I have a tendency to commit a certain typo that happened to not happen when I set up the site on this server. Apparently that led to some very strange things. Crisis averted, typos corrected :) Now I can work on the fun stuff.

I have several sites I am wanting to build. This one, which is of course my personal blog/playground. #2 is a test site for new ClayCMS features and apps, possibly opened to the general public (some of you will recognize it's name when it goes live). #3 is a culmination of several years of development, built using the tested features from #2.

Finish the blog editor, so I can fix that last blog title :)

I ran into some strange server compatibility issues when setting up this site yesterday, so I plan to mainly focus on finding out what is causing them. I'm not sure how much of my free time I'll have left after that. I'm hoping some of them are configuration issues that can be fixed with php.ini directives. I need to tweak the HTML filter, so I can allow HTML in these posts. I also want to set up the user profiles, so I can begin working toward comments and multiuser features. If I have time I'm also going to set up another site, using the multisite package, and use that for a public test site.

Calling it a night...finally. There are still some strange differences I'm noticing between how Clay is running on this web server, compared to my home server. I guess this is just another part of the learning process. Good night!

As you can probably see, the server has been giving me some issues. Apparently I need to compare the server settings between the host and my local server again. Ah well, good thing this is all temporary :)

This is the beginning of a CMS I've been writing. It is based on the Clay Framework, which I've been working on for several years now. There's not a lot to see on the user end right now, but this is a start.