Way back in July, I mentioned my design goals for my PHP Text Blogger software application. It was put on the back burner while I worked on another project. Well, it's back and with a new name (which I won't announce until it's done) and with more details.

A Simple Site Management Application

There are two problems inherent with all website software administered on the web. The first is security. Any website, which can be logged into and where users can enter data, has security risks. Even with the best coding standards and anticipated hacking prevention in place, exploits continue to be found. A large percentage of patches and updates are created to deal with recently discovered exploits, whether actually used by the bad guys or not.

The other problem is the "one size fits all" mentality. In order to reduce development time and make administering the software as easy as possible, every feature possible, whether wanted or not, is made available to everyone using the product. This causes software bloat despite what the developers think.

I have 20 gigabytes of storage available on my VPS hosting plan. I have 10 WordPress installations in place. A full third of those 20 gigabytes is being used by the software. That's just crazy considering I don't use half of the features available and have disabled autosave and post revisions for the blogs I control.

My solution is to have all of the administrative functions operating from my personal web server and using the software to make changes to the live website. It's not that hard if you think about it. All of the functions you need in order to upload or download are contained within PHP.

A Static Website (or Blog) from the Beginning

By keeping all of the administrative functions on my own PC, I can regenerate every page at will, including common items such as archive, category and tag pages. Tracking codes, ad blocks, and anything else like them become permanent parts of the static pages.

Having the ability to pre-gzip the pages comes in handy, making for faster browser display, but I probably won't be doing that. I may include the ability to have the images and JavaScript, if any, on separate subdomains.

One of the problems that plagues websites when they become popular with either people or search engines (or both) is that load on the server increases. Having websites using too much CPU power (running through a PHP interpreter, GZIP or ZLIB on the server, etc.) has caused more than a few people to get shut down by hosting providers and on more occasions than I care to recall. Using static html pages wouldl mitigate that particular situation.

Public or Private

This is an internal debate. Will I make the application public and available to anyone who wants to use it or will I keep it private, for my use and selected others?

When an application is made public, there is a minimal amount of support expected. I can deal with one-on-one email support if it's something simple, but I don't want to open a full-fledged support forum. There will be no plugins or add-ons with this software and only the custom PHP functions may need to be adjusted.

Time to Completion

I have all the ingredients to this software recipe in various stages of completion. I'm spending most of my time on the interface and it's slow going. I purposely walk away and without any notes in order to come back later and make sure I understand why I did what I did.

I'm giving myself plenty of time to get this done the right way the first time. It could be finished a month from now or even six months from now (or in as little as two weeks). I'm going to be using it on a domain that I'm not working with right now as a "proof of concept". I figure that if I can use it, so can a few other people. The domain name will not match the application and I will not be listing it any script sites — if distributed, it will be publicized by word of mouth.

There are some more details I want to mention, but I'm going to hold that off for another day. I'm sure some of my personal contacts are going to have a few questions as it is.

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