I was gonna start the site from scratch again. With scratch I mean a fresh install of CodeIgniter. I felt I needed to do this to be able to set everything up “better”. The first time around I coded everything, and it was a bit “sloppy”. Not very effective use of the CI libraries, wrote my own. And for certain “special functionality” I hacked into the core system to get that working.

But I’ve decided to try a different approach which may save me a lot of time. I copied the whole site locally and at the moment I’m stripping all the templates so that I end up with “plain files” which just echo the results and items needed on the page. Once that’s done I’ll go through all the controllers and clean them up. Same for the models and custom libraries. That way I should end up with what I wanted in the first place without having to go through hours of building the base functionality again. Which works perfectly.

So first up: Template stripping!

For instance, I’ve been working on a re-design for ArtInvolved.com for the last few weeks. This was in fact needed, as the current version lacks a lot of finesse and “punch”, but it means there’s no actual coding being done, thus the site is not moving forward.

Luckily, I’ve ended up with a design and layout now I’m actually happy with. Now the trick is to LEAVE the .psd files and get myself to actually get some programming done.

It’s hard to find the balance between all aspects of improving the site. Cause while I’m reworking the site the current version is kind of “still”. It could use a lot of SEO optimizing and promoting. But I don’t feel like promoting a version I’m not completely happy with. Even though maybe I should.

First order of business: Get myself into wiring the framework back up for the new version. I’ve installed the  latest version of CodeIgniter and will now make a list of all the functionality the site will have to contain so I know roughly which models and controllers to create.

The current site is running 100% on CodeIgniter which is a rather cool MVC framework. The new version will do the same, but in a slightly different setup. The problem I’m having at the moment is trying to figure out if I should start from scratch, re-using (most) of the programming work from the previous version or that I should just copy the whole structure and add to it.

ArtInvolved was the first site I made with the CI engine, so it was all a bit experimental. Now that it’s all up and running I believe I got a better grasp on the framework so I’m leaning towards doing it “over”, and improved.

I’ll let you know!