Six To Eight Weeks

I'm slowly but surely making my way toward beta testing. I have all of the core functionality for events done, and now I'm adding the polish. I'm taking the mantra, "do one thing extremely well," to heart. Attendance is the only thing the software does, so it needs to be an extremely polished experience all around.

I've added some really neat AJAX effects, so the past week has been spent learning AJAX and JSON, hitting some roadblocks, and finally getting the thing looking pretty polished.

I just need to add two quick validation rules to members and eventtypes to prevent XSS. All data is htmlspecialchars cleaned before it is printed to the view, but JSON data must be htmlspecialchars_decode'd, which means that I need to make sure the data itself is clean. Member names and event type names are sent in the clear as JSON objects, which is why the extra validation is needed.

There is one more thing I could do to improve performance. I'm currently loading JSON objects to populate the event calendar one month at a time. When the user navigates to a new month, it's a new AJAX call. But it would greatly improve performance if I loaded several months at once. That fix should not be too difficult, and it's definitely on my list. More polish.

It's all this polish that takes so much time, but is definitely worth it. The best part of my software is its simplicity and ease of use. This I can not compromise on.

The other thing that was on my mind today was that the signup form does not look incredibly enticing. I'm going to start looking at signup forms for other webapps to get inspiration on how I'd like to design mine.

I have decided that my marketing website does not need to look like the app itself. Most webapps have a completely distinct marketing site. I might even be able to keep my current template for my marketing page, and link people over to the signup page on my app when they click the signup button.

Tea, earl grey, hot.

The end is in sight on my web-based attendance software! I'm on track to start beta testing in December. I'm been blogging less in order to spend more time on development. I feel like I'm on the home stretch.