dev in the making

As a follow-up on my previous post, I made a couple of graphs illustrating what PuzzleCMS should be all about. It’s kinda hard to visualize how are things going to work. Maybe a better way to think about it is like this: PuzzleCMS is a HTML (in fact all client side code) snippet managing system. So we are limited only by HTML, CSS and JS. As this my first contact with making such graphs, any comments or thoughts are welcome.

Now that the exams are over and I can forget about school for 3 months, I started doing what I was looking forward to doing whole year long. In fact, I got so overwhelmed now that I’m starting 2 separate projects. One using XNA and C#, other using PHP. I learned a lot about software development in the past year and I intend to use that knowledge.

zGui
zGui is going to be a lightweight GUI framework for XNA, with support for themes, and various other cool stuff I can’t really remember right now. I’m doing this by myself as a part of a larger project. The thing is that I have so many great ideas about games, but most of them are too time consuming and a bit too much for one person to handle. So I intend to patch up several frameworks for use in games. After I get it reasonably working I’m gonna release it and publish the code.

PuzzleCMS
Puzzle is just a work-in-progress name for what seems to be the most extensible and flexible CMS ever. It’s like having Adobe Dreamweaver directly aimed at your site with no need to upload files. We aren’t aiming at the level of user friendliness Adobe Dreamweaver has, our tool (as I see it) will be best for using with mostly static pages with the need to publish something every now and then. It was my good friend’s Danijel’s idea, him being a web designer and he knows what sort of stuff typical web designers want. You will have to know HTML and CSS if you want to achieve good results with our CMS.

The most important thing about both of these projects is that I took the planning phase very seriously. I started doing some graphs for PuzzleCMS in Microsoft Visio which I’m using for the first time, and I have to say that it’s very straight-forward, and has nice and useful templates. These graphs resemble Architecture or Data Design graphs you might find in a Software Design Document. Just helps me keep the big picture in mind. For zGui I started off by adding a class diagram item in my project. It feels just like programming but without that much typing going on! I don’t know how could I live without he class diagram all these years.

A word of advice: Never start programming something bigger than 5 days work without a class diagram.