http://tuatara.syeke.com/
 

It's halfway out of Beta!
http://tuatara.syeke.com/

I just finished the interactive web-based installer, added a new stripped down set of 'demonstration' pages to the archive, and now it's time to bust a little elbow grease writing up the complete documentation and polishing up the API.

Thank you to everybody who offerred to help with the alpha testing, and now beta testing of this project. I haven't heard a peep out of most of you, which either means you've been busy with other aspects of your life, or your ISP has been the most recent target of a terrorist attack. S'all good, either way.

I just thought I would post in here alongside some of the other really nice sites I've seen posted here, and ask you all for your opinion on the site itself. Or the script, if you've downloaded it... but mainly the site. How is it for a demonstration? How can I improve it?

Most importantly, I think you should all click the submit it to stumbleupon button at the end of the menu bar, so I can sit here and laugh maniacally while scarfing down white chocolate chip macadamia nut cookies, watching all the traffic pour in, and bottleneck my server, till it falls to its knees, whimpering in pain, and screaming it's promises of retribution to the masses.... er... :-D I mean... *!*

Seriously though, white chocolate chip macadamia nut cookies are GOOD.
-m

Looks good, but to be fairly honest, I make my own. :P that's why I picked up programming. xD

Experienced programmers know better then to reinvent the wheel :) In terms of working in a corporation, all they are about is mashing together different applications and making them work with each other; this holds true to the web as well :)

I wasn't attempting to reinvent the wheel, this has been my pet project for the past few months. When I started it, I hadn't programmed anything in PHP for over five years, and I had absolutely no clue how to do anything 'object oriented'. So it's a culmination of everything I learned, and it got so big I decided I wanted to release and see what kind of public response it would get - I learn well on my own, but I figured I could learn a lot more by hearing from people all over the world.

What I love about this project so far is it's becoming a great 'framework' I can use in future projects. Using the library files I had already created I built a news system (basically a small blog) with comments in under ten minutes yesterday.

My idea for the future of this project is to build a central authentication system that can be used with any combination of drop-in sub-system you choose -- have you ever wanted to build a site with two opposing systems, say a forum and a blog, which both have their own proprietary user registration? Having a site where a member has to sign up twice to use all it's features is far from user-friendly. If I can get this to a stable release, and start bringing on other people from the open source community to help develop modules, I think I can make a reliable 'framework' that non-programmers can use to add fully integrated features to their web site.

It may never happen like that, but I'm enjoying doing it. ;-)
-m

Making your own User Authentication & MySQL Backend system is reinventing the wheel on the web? :P

It may be, but there's never anything wrong with competition either. Everything I've ever read learning PHP has always said "don't do this yourself! Other people have done it! Use their work!". I say, I'll learn from their work, yes, and then do my own for the most part, because creating an entire application out of bits and pieces of other peoples work feels to me like cheating. It's not mine.

Also, there's nothing wrong with reinventing the wheel sometimes. If the first caveman made it square, where would we be if the second hadn't made it round? Or the third made it out of rubber?
-m

I do believe you could say that the first cavemen made the first of it's kind, then considering the innovation of it being round by the second, eh?

So likely, you can make it better.

That's what you're doing, yes?
Making a better user authentication & mysql backend system.

So really, you're not reinventing it, you're just making it better. :P Maybe in different code but still, you're making it a better user auth&mysql backend. :D

Well better is definitely yet to be seen. I'm sure there's programmers here and out there that could wipe the floor with my code, but the biggest part of it for me, and why I do almost anything I do is simple: I enjoy doing it. ;-)
-m

Same here. Some programmers do it just for money, v_v

Yeah; you guys kinda took that outa context :D It sparked a very interesting conversation for me to read over though. You guys are both very right though.

I agree, but to get back to your original post, looks great.

What about some bots that register at sites and click all links in email sent to the email they registered?

Damn Busted. Ye really am meaning to get around to trying this out though.

How do you pronounce the name anyways?

You might want to wait a week or two, I'm coming out with beta 3 which includes;

• Full, and I mean full site overhaul. Nothing spectacular with the new design, I just needed to redo the user interface to support a variety of new features and abilities of Tuatara.
• Redesigned administrative interface - again, to support the expanding feature set. Wanted to make something a little more fluid too, so the tables/directories didn't need to be so tight.
• Much more in depth documentation
• Some improvements to the templating engine
• Minor overhaul of the member modules, additional security and various various bug fixes across the board.
• Four add-on modules, including a headlines system (prelim to a blog module), project tools (minimal at this point, just includes a feature request and bug reporting system), comments (can be dropped into any page with two simple lines of code), and a bbcode parser which is primarily for use by the comments system, but can be downloaded and used on it's own too.

Oh, and it's pronounced two-ah-tara ;-)
-m

Suggestion, PLEASE DO NOT RELY ON $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].

It really messes up on my server.

I was actually relying on people changing LIB_PATH to reflect their document root, as per the installation instructions - $_SERVER was used as a placeholder since it would work effectively on at least half (I was hoping) of the installations. However this method seems to have confused most of the people downloading the project so when the next version comes out you will see a dramatic change in the way things are initialized. I've taken into account all the feedback I've received from the first two betas, along with some new techniques I've learned along the way to make this process a lot more streamlined, hopefully.

I'm trying desperately to make sure the documentation, installation and administration of the new release are as verbose and intuitive as possible, which has slowed me down considerably. That and life... I also went in and dramatically reconstructed the whole database schema to optimize the system and include a much more effective access control system - slow going again as I was writing the upgrade installation process at the same time so as to not piss off anybody who was using an earlier beta. ;-)
-m

To get the current document path you could use this:
and you could also use realpath so that you can go up a directory etc:

Additionally there is also;

Multiple methods to reach the same objective, the essence of PHP. ;-)

My idea originally was to allow the user to install it to any directory they wished, with the ability to again modify that via the admin panel (with checks in place, of course, to make sure the files were located in the new location beforehand to avoid breaking the system).

It would seem to be a better idea at this point to just hardcode the system paths to ease initial installation and setup, and anybody who gets adventurous can modify the code from there to change the locations, instead of visa versa.

Thanks for all the input everybody.
-m

True indeed, nice design by the way

Or use the magic __DIR__ compile time constant as of PHP 5.3 :):