[clue-talk] Updating the ol Website

[erik at ezolan.com]

> What site is it and what does it need to do?

It a story site. People zip up their story and upload it. Fill out a page
of details and the PHP inserts all the info into the database. The rest of
the pages deal with going through the database and bringing up the stories
by the critera you want. Author, title, subject, etc.

Added a page for the story contest, and some links to the Forum, the Wiki,
and the gallery. The latter are all open source solutions.

> Start with a requirements document or mini-doc.

I've never looked into that, the site is pretty basic.

> You might be able to use one of the open-source Content Management
> Systems, or something like Wordpress, etc.

Gah. I have a few competitors and they're doing that. Their sites are
shoehorned into the software, far more complex than it needs to be and
difficult to add to. Theirs look a lot better, but mine is superior when
it comes to functionality. And I've barely changed things for the past 5
years.

I suppose that's common complant for OSS. Doesn't look that good but works
great.

> Save you a lot of headache on coding the back-end so you can focus on
> your content.

My content is 100% user created. :)

I'm doing fine with the content. The only issue with that is the users
want to be able to search through all the stories for key phrases.
Considering people can upload using any document format, and the
processing requirements something like that would take, I'm probably not
going to implement that.

What I need to do is update the design/looks of the thing. Currently it's
cobbled together HTML. I should also look into updating the PHP so I can
turn off register_globals.

Just ordered a new CSS book from Amazon. The one for Dummies isn't that good.