ciplex

So, more news coming in regarding our site development...

I spoke with our ciplex project manager, Michal, earlier this week about our development schedule, and was given an honest and somewhat discouraging asessment. In short, accomplishing the tasks as designed is proving to be much more complicated/difficult than had been anticipated.

What is holding things up is the new registration process. Drupal is designed to work a certain way out of the box, and we are attempting to add/modify that process in order to make the process simple for folks to use  while helping our project accomplish specific things.

There was a meeting today at Ciplex to address our web development issues. The development on our new registration process has been dragging on and remains incomplete. Meanwhile, a lot of additional functionality remains unpolished and things are behind schedule in general. Ahhh, gotta love web development. 

I'm told that Ciplex has moved some resources around, and that this upcomming week we will see a lot of results. Michal, our project manager, is going to be looking at things over the weekend. Hopefully by Monday we will have a more detailed diagnosis, and things will be back on track.

Kind of some bad news to report...

there have been some frustrating developments with our web development. Things are behind schedule, and moving at a slow pace. I was in touch with Ciplex two weeks ago to discuss these issues, and they were to bring on a new developer last week, which has supposedly happened, but we are yet to see any results, and I am beginnig to feel concerned. 

I spoke with our project manager a moment ago, and he shares in my frustration. He is going to look into the situation again and hopefully we will have a better understanding of what is going on by tomorrow. Meanwhile, our milestones have been pushed back.

Here are some sneak previews of the new designs I've been working on for our new site's registration signup and profile setup. (click any image to preview in actual size).

The New Join Page:

New Users can Join for Free to become basic crew members, or Join and Donate $1 or more to become Producers. If they Join for free, they will be required to complete a Captcha and then confirm their email address.

Michal from Ciplex made these flowcharts to help articulate the various paths a user will travel through the signup process. We just reviewed these and isolated a few more pages that need to get mocked up, so i will be doing that today. Prepping the registration process has taken a week longer than anticipated, which has pushed coding back a bit, but we are making progress, and everyone seems to be getting more excited about the project as we get more into the details...

For those interested in how a Drupal site is developed, I'm posting our current "to do" list for our web development.

Web development happens in stages, much like film production. 'Pre-production' of the new site is now pretty much done. We have a detailed technical spec, a plan of attack, and a bunch of stuff to do. We have started production, and will be heavy into it for the next two months. Then post-production is the launch and all the bug fixes.

We passed 9,800 Producers yesterday! Thanks everyone who has been joining!

Meanwhile, I've been working super long hours designing the new sign up and registration process. Been workin on it for 2 weeks! Finally finished at 3am last night and uploaded the PSD files to Ciplex. I was so tired, i was falling asleep as each file uploaded. But I wanted to get it done as custom coding was waiting for these new designs.

So yesterday, I ran into our drupal project manager, Michal Minecki, at the LA Drupal Camp. So far I am really happy with the work Michal and our Ciplex team has been doing. After the Drupal sessions, Mike and I went to a coffee shop to review the designs and technical spec, and discovered a near miscommunication. I don't think this would have been caught quite so quickly- if at all - had we not met in person. bonus points for the real world.

I spent the weekend uploading PSD files of our new site designs to our client server on Ciplex. Meanwhile, Ciplex has started to layout some milestones for web development. Screencap of milestones is below:

So here is the current plan:

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