Stories are in place - time to move on to new things

The Stories section is now in a fairly good place. It will be some tinkering, and I am still playing around in my mind how I want to make the database relations show up. It is in a good enough place, so I can move on to other areas. The areas that are up on the board are a new Links database, a new Videos database and the Code Reference database. I probably will start with the Links, since it makes it a bit easier to work with Stories that way.

The things remaining to iron out with Stories are a little bug in the category listings where you can not rate the first entry, and I also want a way to map feeds to the custom fields. Fosters over at the IPS forums had an RSS plugin that allowed that, and I hope that this might lead to a solution for this. I can still live without it, but it would help a lot to have this mapping.

For links, nothing beats Links Directory from Adriano. Unfortunately, though, I can't cross-link applications with databases. This means that I can not pull in data from different databases. It is also affected by different changes that IPS does, which has ruined applications in the past more times than I care to think of. So, while I will never get all the features that are in Adrianos amazing product, I do get a solution that fit into the overall structure that is also less prone to be affected by application rules and changes.

This is the same reason for the Videos database. While the current solution is very good, I do want a solution I can cross-reference and that I can control. I also want a way to automatically bring in videos from popular creators, which again would benefit greatly from having a mapping with custom fields...

The Code Reference database on the other hand will be a different beast. While the documentation is not that hard to do, there are a lot of cross-references that needs to be handled. For HTML, for example, there are elements and attributes with several reference sheets for languages and so on. CSS have selectors and functions. So the solution must have options for multiple references with different names. I will start this for frontend, and then we can see where we go from there.

Onwards towards greatness 🙂