We’ve also brought online further servers to help us with two important tasks: creating previews of your books (the ‘Update PDF’ feature) and sending your books to the printing press when all is ready-to-go.

Right now everyone here at AllYearbooks is incredibly busy helping our customers finish the content of their yearbooks off, creating collages, awards pages, covers and lots more. Big boss man Jake is sending dozens of yearbooks off to print each and every day

Adding a messages or signatures page (when logged into yearbook: 'All pages', 'Add new pages…' and then 'Signature/messages', the fourth option)

Many of our customers choose to have a few pages at the back of their book like these, it makes it feel more professional and complete to have somewhere for your members to sign each others’ books and leave memento messages and farewells. Of course, if you have your own design you can simply upload this as a JPEG or PDF file directly into your book.

We also have a plethora of custom page backgrounds that can be assigned to particular groups of profile pages. If you have a particular background that you want to use, make sure it’s in JPEG format and exactly 2,554 x 3,583 pixels in dimension, then send it as an attachment with an email to our email address (find this under ‘Contact helpdesk’, last link on the menu, in your yearbook).

And finally, we’ve cleaned up the photo gallery area of the yearbook site. It should now be easier to add new photo folders and see an overview of your existing ones:

Cleaned up photo gallery area on yearbook site

Based on feedback from visitors and customers, we are currently on a mission to improve the ease of use and usability of our website. You should see many gradual improvements of the next month-or-so which will make both your and our lives easier. If you are having any troubles, problems or have any questions about your yearbook or the site, don’t hesitate to have a chat with us about it

Normally I’m busy coding new features, fixing bugs and generally improving our website alongside Jake. But recently I was helping out for a brief period also designing the photo collages and so forth. We’ve hired more help – so far, in the form of Pratik (aka ‘the Master’, ‘Mr P.’ and dozens of other pseudonyms). He’s been beavering away helping Nic and David clear out some of the collage work and doing so remarkably quickly!

Now, on to the exciting news… next year’s website! We’re planning Big Things™ for next year; some of the ideas we’ve had so far are:

• Completely custom templates: This year we’ve been able to help quite a few of our customers out with having their own page design. However, next year a sophisticated, flexible system is currently being built that will allow you to have just about any design you can conjure up! But more importantly: we’ll be able to create and show you the design in breakneck time!
• Clean redesign: Jake has been busy prototyping a clean, streamlined and ‘Web 2.0′-feel redesign for our main website (the one you see when you’re not in logged into a yearbook)
• Going international: we’re thinking about expanding to allow yearbooks to be made from other countries, not just the UK, and hence language support on the website and the final printed yearbooks
• Facebook app: So many of our current users have an account on Facebook, so we think we should have the ability to complete and manage your yearbook entirely through a Facebook app
• iPhone and iPod Touch app: Continuing the trend of making AllYearbooks available whenever and wherever you are, we think an app for these popular devices would be very useful
• Chat rooms: the ability for all of the hundreds of members in all of our yearbooks being able to chat with each other, their editors and us – the trusty AllYearbooks team

Finally, here’s a sneak preview of what Jake has been working on and constantly refining to make sure that our website is very easy-to-use, modern and accessible:

A screenshot of the work-in-progress prototype design Jake has been creating for next year

When we launched the new features last week, the chat system let us get immediate feedback from you, our customers, and the new site updates were well praised

Today, we upgraded the chat system to iron out some bugs, and add support for a certain less-capable browser that is still installed in a large proportion of schools and colleges: Internet Explorer 6. Our chat system now works fully on Internet Explorer (version 6 and later), Mozilla Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera and more!

So, if you’ve got any questions about your yearbook, the website or anything else, simply login and start chatting to us. During working hours (and often outside of them!) someone will reply within a few minutes, sometimes seconds

Our main office server which hosts our network shares, backup system for the live website and a plethora of other things now detects whenever one of our USB backup drives are plugged in. The logic is: we plug in one of our backup drives at the end of the day, wait a few minutes for any changes to copy across (thanks to rsync), unplug and store them at home.

More importantly, all of our drives are fully 256-bit encrypted (not just password protected!) meaning that if one of these drives was lost or stolen, it be almost impossible for someone to crack the encryption and gain access to our customers’ data.

You can rest assured that here at AllYearbooks we take data privacy and security very seriously.

Our system is quite unique in that as you progress building your yearbook — inviting new members, uploading photos, adding custom pages and so forth — you are given the opportunity to preview exactly how your book will look once it’s gone to print. We’re keeping this useful feature but making important changes:

• Allowing members to upload two profile photos each
• Making our templates accommodate this second photo
• Text that wraps and flows professionally around objects on the page
• Rounded corners on borders and photos

The greatest change, though, will be that because of the new programming of our PDF system, we will soon be able to create unique, custom templates when one of our lovely customers requests it. For example, if the selection of templates provided doesn’t suit you or you like the look of one but would prefer it with a few tweaks here-and-there, we will be able to modify an existing template or create a brand new one for your yearbook.

Compared to our competition, I think this is getting the “best of both worlds” — everyone uploads their entries and photos online, the editors choose or requests a template and the final yearbook feels impressive and gleams with professionalism. Plus, unlike some of our competitors, you won’t need to wait a week or more for your template to be generated for you

The text and images are already written and taken – they’ve all been used in our brilliant information packs. The problem is there’s just been soooo much to do and this is such a long and boring task that I’ve been constantly pushing it back. Well, it can wait no more so I’m trudging through it now. Expect to see lots of new text and images around the website over the next couple of days.

The image below is the dreaded ‘todo’ card. Its all part of the ‘agile’ system of software development. Whenever something pops up that needs to be done, we jot it down onto an index card and add it to the todo pile. Then once every Tuesday morning Jamey and I have a meeting where we go over all the current todo cards and figure out which ones we’ll both be tackling that week, and in what priority. This particular card has been sitting there staring me in the face for weeks!

Whenever our customers come up with ideas for the website, we put them on index cards too. We love getting feedback and ideas from you – so keep them coming on the contact page.

WordPress rather than Drupal blog

To begin with, this blog is now on WordPress rather than Drupal – and I have to say that I’m loving it… and so are my non-geeky colleagues. It ticks all the right boxes. Its *really* user friendly. Its much easier to add photos (and videos) to posts. And it’s hardly taken long at all to setup.

So where did Drupal go wrong with this? Well, I guess its the ‘kitchen sink’ approach back-firing. In trying to be something to everyone, Drupal runs the risk of being less than perfect to to any one specific task too. WordPress, on the other hand, has the ability to focus on being the very best blogging software out there, and nothing else gets in the way of that or deters it from its ultimate goal.

But also, we needed to seaparate the business end of our website (the creation of yearbooks, using tens of thousands of nodes) from the nodes and users to do with the blog, partly because around this time every year we flush out the old site and start a new. So we were either going to have a separate Drupal install for the blog or use WordPress. We chose WordPress.

Form theming frustrations

Have a look at the form here and let me know how you’d create it using FAPI (we’re on Drupal 6.4). I’m talking specifically about the theming of the form. Yes, its a very simple form. A search form. But let’s have a look at what’s going on with it and discuss the Drupal way versus the way we ended up doing it.

In FAPI, you’d probably have a ‘textfield’ element for the search box and a ‘submit’ element for the ‘Go’ button. Easy enough, one minute of code. But what about the title ‘Name of your school or group’? Probably a title for the textfield element, no? But then how do we get it centred above both the textfield and the submit button? And what about the text under the two fields? A description, right? Again… how do we get it to appear *exactly* where we want it? The look and feel of the form are to me absolutely crucial. I don’t just want a textfield’s title (with annoying colon after it), a textfield, a description, and then a Go button all one on top of the other.

The Drupal solution? Using a theme hook. We define the form in our implementation of hook_form() and then theme that form separately. The ‘programmer’ cares about the functionality of the form but not the visual design of the form. The ‘designer’ doesn’t care about the functionality and instead works on how it looks. But I’m both the programmer and the designer here, and I want my work to be as easy as possible! So, let’s say i go down this route (I tried, I really did). I need to register my theme function in hook_themes(). Okay, I know why, it saves extra code running on every page load. But its still annoying. Now I create my theme function… urgh. You’ve got to really know your FAPI stuff to get this to work. I try for a while but then I give up. It just feels so messy with some code somewhere, some in another place, and then when I ask my colleague to have a look so he can learn how to do it he’s disgusted… doesn’t know what’s going on… starts bad-mouthing Drupal. So we build our own massively simple FAPI instead in about half an hour that does just what we want it to do.

So now we’re using our own super-basic FAPI for this form. Not all forms, just the ones we want complete control over, visually. Rather than using hook_form() and defining a form array, we just hard-code the HTML for the form. Some of you may be in complete horror now thinking about this but its just by far and away the easiest way to get forms to do exactly what you want. Like a forename and surname field side by side rather than one on top of the other, sharing the title ‘Name’ which is a label for the forename field.

We’re sticking with the idea of a validate() and submit() hook though. I like that one. But we’re doing it slighly differently and more simply, so that any new coders we might hire can quickly and easily pick it up.

Going nodeless

I don’t always like nodes. I really, really don’t. I don’t need revisions, and if I did I’d do them in my own way, just the right way for me, rather than a way that kind of works for everyone but not quite perfectly for anyone in specific. I don’t like the way that as uid=1 I get all the extra bits like ‘Authoring information’ which I never touch. Node hooks and the nodeapi which I once loved are now a higgeldy-piggledy mess that’s a real pain for my new hire. I try to explain to him what’s going on when I save a node. “So this function deals with the submission. But not the core node stuff, Drupal deals with that. And if we want something used for all nodes, we put it in here instead. And we can also override this specific bit here.”… he looks on in amazement, totally baffled by what’s going on and why. It would be so much easier for him (and me) to understand if everything’s just in one place.

So what do we gain from nodes? Umm… not much really. We don’t use contributed modules any more because they never do exactly what I want and always do stuff which I don’t want them doing which just make them less efficient. We put all our code in our own one module instead. A massive, hefty module with a dozen or so include files.

We gain the ability to always do $node->nid and use node_save() and other handy things. But we don’t really need nodes, and it frustrates me having to do the extra INNER JOINs on node_revisions etc. So we’re trialing not using nodes at all for one of our content types – our customers. We just have a simple ‘id’ field now in one single table. We no longer need to INNER JOIN node and node_revisions. We haven’t had any problems so far, but the new hire is finding it much easier to code now, without the ‘baggage’ of Drupal.

The future

Our current plan is to gently migrate away from Drupal, perhaps altogether. We like the idea of building our own framework again, one that does exactly what it needs to do for our site. Its not something we can do overnight. Ours is a yearly cycle, following the academic year, and the current plan is to fork the codebase in around January/February and that would mark the beginning of our own framework if we still feel that way then.

In the meantime, we’ll continue using nodes for most of our content types (if simply because migrating away from them would be a long and arduos task with little reward) and we’ll continue to use FAPI for most our forms. But I see us using our own simple FAPI for more and more forms where we need complete control over them, and I see us extending this FAPI to help us reduce using the same code multiiple times.

I think I still like Drupal. I definitely appreciate the vibrant community. But sometimes I thoroughly hate Drupal and get massively frustrated by it. But I still like it in theory at least. One framework for all my websites. But whilst I just work on one massive website it just has so much less use to me.

You’re more than welcome to urge me to stay with Drupal. In fact, I highly hope someone can manage this. I’ve put a lot of time over the last few years into learning Drupal, and it would be a great waste and a shame to lose all that.

At around 13:37 this afternoon with only about 2 minutes of down time. Unfortunately there was no big red button to press, but the ‘launch sequence’ was something like this:

$ vim /etc/httpd/conf.d/allyearbooks.conf
[edit virtual hosts here]
$ service httpd stop
$ mv public_html 08
$ service httpd start

… that’s geek talk for “make new website work and stuff”.

So, what’s changed? Umm… not an awful lot for you. The main changes are behind the scense to make our lives easier and hence keep our time down and hence the costs for you! But apart from that, we have made some minor tweaks here and there, and we’ve also added the ability for you to create a web-based yearbook all yourselves, without having to contact us at all first. So if you find us at 2am and want to get going straight away then now you can. Top banana.

Also important is that now that we’ve finally launched we can begin adding in lots and lots of new features on top of the new code base. So back to coding for me then.

Just a quick one, it looks like once Jake and I sort out the remaining bug fixes and an assortment of data processing jobs, we will be launching the new 2009 website! Some time by the end of today…

The great thing is that our lovely customers will now be able to sign up for a yearbook on the website itself using our new intelligent yearbook creation sign-up process! This saves everyone time and also means you can get work on your new yearbook immediately, which is a big step forward to helping us become the best online yearbook creation system around

More updates when they happen.