The future of SBM (Starlight PHP Bookmarks Script) August 19

(Please excuse my messy writing. I blame my current lack of sleep.)

I started working on this little project in 2007 with the idea of learning from it. Did it meet its original purpose? Yes, it did. I've learned quite an amount of PHP scripting and even developed some new habits. I now have a greater understanding of many things.

Today, I feel less clueless in what regards PHP scripting and web development, and have also learned to have more confidence in myself and my abilities. Because now I know for sure, that this is what I want to do in the future. I want to develop for this medium. And more than that, I have the desire to innovate. While I am ages away from such high ambitions, I know that I'm on the right track, and that eventually, if I continue to work hard every day, I'll get there.

Not so recently (more like a few months ago), I realized that my own little script (that nobody else can use at this moment, because it was never even finished), no longer meets my own standards of quality, in many aspects. So, I've decided to rewrite everything. The plan is still the same, though. This project is mainly for practice, and while it is probably useless to make something like this, with so many wonderful tools and services available today (social bookmarks and tumblelogs FTW! <3), I still want to do it and, if good enough, share it with others. I know that at least I will use this script, because I love bookmarking web pages, and always wanted to have a very neat, personalized website dedicated to sharing my personal bookmarks.

The most noticeable change in this new attempt will be the use of tags instead of categories, to organize the bookmarks. All this time, I was using a category system. And while the idea is not so bad, because I could still go with it and have a working script, I find tag systems to be more flexible. After all, a tag could be used as a category, by simply adding that same tag to every bookmark that you want to keep in that category. So, by going with that approach, I am not losing anything. On the contrary!

Another important change is that I'll probably use a development framework, and object-oriented PHP. It is very likely that I will end up choosing CakePHP, which I've come to be so fond of. This framework has many conventions and seems very rigid, but that rigidness makes the scripts (and chunks of them) developed with it to be more reusable. It is truly modular, and I love that! If I don't choose CakePHP or any other framework, then I'll at least consider something like Smarty.

Also, I want to take advantage of Ajax, and learn to work with this technology efficiently, so I'll probably make some use of it at some point. However, I don't want my script to depend on it. Not at all.

There will be many other changes, but those are the most important ones. And as there are changes, there are also things that remain the same. Such as, the goals. Like I said, this script's main purpose is serve as my self-practice environment.

Apart from that, I want SBM to be small, simple, and lightweight. I want it to be only visible to the administrator, so making the appearance of the front-end (I think this is the term?) as customizable as possible is one of the top priorities. Two other important features that I wish to implement, once I have the knowledge, are RSS and Atom feeds, and the ability to import bookmarks from other places (web browsers, social bookmarking sites, etc.), as well as to export what you have stored with the script, so that you can keep your bookmarks safe, always.

I know these are more like self-notes, because I don't think any of you reading this blog have ever seen a demonstration of the script (I've shown it only to a handful of people, for feedback), but I still want to share my progress here.

And that is all I have to say for now. In a nutshell, I've decided to rewrite my SBM script, "from scratch".