Development Notes
by Kenneth Richards - Tuesday, October 07, 2003
from the Development dept.

Just a few things to report here about development. I wanted to update you on the status of the "site updater" feature, error notifications, the "site map" and the dynamic menu.

First of all, I wanted to create a site map to replicate all of the links found in the dynamic menu system. One reason was to make the menu system available to all users of the site (even those whose browsers don't support the dynamic menu system. Another reason was to create a "spider-friendly" page allowing popular web search engines to crawl the entire site.

The result of this can be seen in our new Site Map. This is built directly from the configuration of the dynamic menu module which is stored in the database. It automatically builds a two column layout of all of the menu options and then caches this on the server to keep database load to a minimum.

I have begun development on an ambitious project to create a
Site Updater which will allow users of ASP Nuke to quickly download and install updates or additional modules to the software. Of course this will require developers to "publish" and install or update package to the update site. I hope this will make ASP Nuke just a little bit easier to use.

On a side note... I have installed a custom error handler in IIS to notify me of any errors which occur on the site. This will help me weed out all of the major bugs in the site before we release the code. I will add some documentation about how this works in the very near future.

The release date for the ASP Nuke project is fast approaching. I hope to get everything done in time. Please forgive me if I miss the scheduled date. I am busy getting everthing all cleaned up and packaged correctly. I don't want to release a buggy set of code with incomplete sections.