I really want to finish this plugin. I’m getting a little tired of using two solutions for my website and I want to get back to working on other things I’ve planned. So instead of giving everyone the play-by-play for the application (which has been taking FOREVER), I’m going to give status updates on the project, open up a subversion repository, and just start building the applicaiton. At certain points along the way I’ll give posts about certain aspects of the development process that you should keep in mind for application development.
I’ve been swaped the past month with work and school so development on this plugin was somewhat slow. I have finished up my plans for spam checking, however. Considering that this is, basically, version 1 I’ve not written it very well in terms of adding additional spam solutions, but for now there is a Spam class that contains some abstracted functions for spam checking. These functions basically run other functions within the class based upon config variables. Currently there are functions to handle either Akismet or TypePad AntiSPam; I cheated because technically TypePad uses the same API calls as Akismet. Two for the price of one! If no spam solution is specified in the app.yml config file, then all comments are automatically approved. I have still not added Mollum spam checking because it doesn’t return a straight-up boolean response but will, if unsure of the comment’s status after an initial check, present the user with a CAPTCHA field. This sort of two-step process will be a little more involved and I’ll need to see about implementing it later. For now, however, spam collection with two different checking solutions is finished.
Next to work on is the Show View for posts. I want, as stated before, to allow the displaying and listing of posts (basically the entire post module for the frontend) to use any sort of WordPress theme. I will be continuing to push for this goal after cleaning up the subversion repository.
Which brings me to my final bit of news. I suck at subversion; I may use the CLI for it, but it you were to ask me to merge two branches to the trunk or something standard like that, I’d say get someone else. I’m good at checking code out and checking code in. Producing branches and trunks? Not so good at that, but I need to learn. To do so, I’ll be spending a bit of time today cleaning up my project repository and working copy in case anybody wants to check anything out. Currently I’m still developing a full-blown application and not a plugin; converting from a project to a plugin isn’t that hard, so I’ll probably spend some time converting it and continue development as a plugin. The benefit is that if anyone wants to try out this unfinished plugin, or offer any suggestions, they’ll be able to checkout code themselves. I’ll post the URL of the repository as soon as I get it all figured out.