Zaapt Continued Progress
While I haven't done a huge amount to Zaapt recently, it is still getting added to and tweaked.
Each time I add something new to Zaapt, I realise something else about the way in which it all needs to fit together. For example, I just added the ability for a user to edit their signature which will be added to all of their forum posts.
This doesn't sound like a hard thing to do: edit a text field and display it when necessary, but it does throw up a few things to think about.
As I've mentioned before, you learn what a user can or can't do (should or shouldn't?) for each of the content types which have already been added. For the forums so far, the only information that was specific to the user was the total number of posts they had made. This has now changed with the addition of being able to edit their signature (though they are both specific to the user, only one is editable, the other is generated).
Along with the 'Account' type and the 'Profile' type (specific to KiwiWriters, this means there are now more types in which a user can edit information. This could also be used for their site preferences too though that will come at a later date.
All in all, it's been very interesting developing Zaapt so far and though there is a long way to go, I feel it's worthwhile me doing it.
This post originated on http://chilts.org/.
Email me on andychilton -at- gmail -dot- com.