Getting my sleeves rolled up.

I want to start on the edit page soon. I'm not looking forward to it as its a seriously complex bit of scripting. I can't even start to improve the page till I have the PHP version fully functional.

Anyway, the consequences are that I really need to get to work on session handling and logins. This side of things would be easy were it not for the army of crawlers , robots and other web automatons that constantly bombard the site.

Since I have no wish to advertise viagra for third parties on my site I have no option but to take part in a ridiculous arms race. luckily I still have a few aces up my sleeve.

One of the parts of the old beer engine that works well is the multi layered rights management. I intend to keep this pretty much the way it is now but rewriting it all in PHP will take some time. While I'm working on this not much will change visibly but it's one of the foundations the site is built on.

If you have a beer engine account you are already able to log in to the new version but I wouldn't bother. Nothing that depends on accounts has been built yet.

I've hacked some very basic country / province tables together so you can navigate from the 'places' link to a town and on to entries. This part of the site is likely to change a lot so I won't be putting a lot of effort in at this stage.

Lastly, for this post, when I get fed up looking at PHP script I do a bit of work on the new XHTML templates for the site. It's my intention to make the entire site accessible using text readers and other specialist browsers. This makes things like a high contrast version or a more mobile friendly version a simple change of stylesheet away. I've never been that comfortable with CSS2 techniques. For a living I convert invoices to html (using XSLT) and since invoices are primarily tabular, tables are my stock in trade. I've recently been developing for companies with very strict accessibility requirements so I'm finally getting up to speed with this way of doing things. Any CSS2 hotshots out there want to 'Zen Garden' the beer engine?