Significant progress on Note-a-Day (version 3.0). The infrastructure is mostly complete.

Just worked out all the 'clean URL' logic in a much better way than version 2.x. In 2.x, everything is tied to the article filename, which usually looks like '15-FEB-2006'. To view the article, you access something like 'article.php?15-FEB-2006'.

But in version 3, there will be no visible '.php' files in the URL, and I've done away with question mark queries entirely. And there are no more dates in the article access code. It's just an article ID. And it's multi-user, so the weblog author has to show up in the site URL if you want to access a particular author's weblog.

So the URL for my weblog is going to look something like 'http://(somewhere)/mike/(something)' instead of 'http://(somewhere)/index.php/mike/(something)'.

And to look at a particular article it will be 'http://(somewhere)/article/9'.

All of this requires significant cooperation with the webserver. Mod_rewrite, ForceType directives, all kinds of stuff. It's easy stuff once the URL format is clarified. But it won't be plug-n-play. I'm not even going to try and support non-Apache environments or anything but 5.x PHP using mysqli (which requires at least 4.x MySQL). There comes a time when old software has to die, especially since nobody is actually paying me to do this. There isn't enough time in the day to make it work on IIS and PostGresQL. Even supporting 4.x PHP requires lots of hacks to accomodate the changes in various function calls.

What's left on the 3.0 to-do list:

• comment moderation (easy)
• upgrade RSS feeds to SQL drivers (easy)
• user manager (a bit more work)
• configuration editor (remove executable code from the configuration; -  challenging)
  
• migrating my thousands of old archives (will require a few dry runs before I actually do it.)

Think it's time to come up with a secret project name. All good software has a secret project name (which hardly ever remains a secret).