My Plan for february and Rainbow
The rainbow project is moving along at a nice pace, with some great enthusiasm from people like Manu, Eric, Mark, Rahul, Ace and other....... the 1.6 release was pretty solid, and soon followed by a preliminary 2.0 release, which is being cleaned up and smoothed out.
The community is getting it's act together, with consolidated forums, and discussions, and the energy is pumping amongst the developers.
So let me tell you a little about what I have been working on and will be working on for the comming period.
I am focusing my efforts in areas that lead to core functionality, as well as UI and Usability factors. My first project has been to upgrade the Settings Table ( long pages with several fieldsets ) into a nice new ASP.NET Wizard control, aptly names SettingsWizard.
This seemingly little task quickly became a slighlty more complicated project than anticipated ( which I got a kick out of, since rainbow is open source... and even thuogh it's a serious project and begining to gear towards a business model, I still like to have fun and learn new things when I code )...and since I got cracking on it, I thought I would go all out. Introducing some Ajax usage with the help of the MagicAjax library, I created a MessageCotrol that modules and controls (or any code) can use to genearte a nice message box to the page using ajax. The point being you can call an method on the server to execute some code, and then give a useful message to the user like "Changes Saved!",
(Sorry, I will work on creating better screen shots :-) )
i then got the idea to move my nifty little response writes into a static (2.0 .net not 1.1 sealed) class, with a debugwrite method that stores the writes in a list, and on the page render, is generated into the message box along with the page. Of course you can then hide the messages by closing the message control window.
My excitment got the better of me, and drove me to explore magic ajax a little deeper in rainbow, as I wanted the add module control to be ajaxified, and put my new module on the page, without refreshing ( How nice would that be :-) ), also, by ajaxifying the combos in add module, we will reduce the load times and viewstate of the page by quite a large ammount, so that the page can be on any page without it being obtrusive to admin's.
Lastly, as I was discussing with Mark the new ASP.NET menu's, we got to talking, and I will be modyfing an SQL SiteMap provider I have to work with the rainbow rb_tabs table, and generate .net 2.0 site map for menu controls, and hoepfully Mark will replace solopart and things like that with the out of box menu controls.
All in all, Rainbow is looking at a bright year ahead of itself. we have a great team filled with long time members, and an bunch of new developers showing interest.