SSC - The Smooth Sailing CMS

SSC began as little more than a high school project. Below is a brief history of how is started off to get to how you see it now.

History of SSC

2005

The initial beginnings of this project began back in early 2005 in Year 12 where for one of my topics, I had to create an interactive website for a local business or organisation. This was the first large project I had done in PHP and while I got the job done, I wasn't entirely pleased with the result. The backend was rushed (text based menu's and not very user friendly - despite trying), the website theme (though template based) needed work, and due to a request from my contact with yacht club (ie Dad), it implemented a frames based layout.

By the end of 05, the website was put into production and left to rot since we hadn't gotten around to showing other club members the backend. During the following school holidays, various tweaks and some pages added but updates were rare.

2006

During Swotvac in November 06 I started v2 and completely re-did the framework that the backend ran on and while happy with the progress, settled down for exams. After this, work slowly progressed over the Summer months before returning to Uni in late February.

2007

After observing how things worked in existing CMS systems (such as Joomla! and Drupal), some changes were applied to make the system more flexible (and thus no longer hard-coded to its original website). Work then slowly continued during 2nd term over any spare time during the weekends.

May 26th resulted in the first obvious module - a "static" page controller allowing for pages to be formatted using a custom wiki-like formatting style to create pages. The current website would continue to run off of this module until a "dynamic" version appears with the ability for news-posts (however this is a low priority).

During mid-year holidays in July, a lot of work was carried out on SSC to bring it to the first potential release of V2. Testing started at the end of July and as such, numerous bugs have been since squashed.

September arrived, and with it, the introduction of a news module allowing for news/blog postings - this module became the front-page for the site.

2008

Due to the prolonged drought during 2007-2008, summer employment finished earlier than expected which gave the opportunity to dive into development for V3. For most of the remaining uni holidays, work was done on the core infrastructure to allow flexibility between modules and the core. Uni began and only during SWOTVAC week did much of this hard work show through with a sub-working version of a number of modules.

2008-Now

Since the preliminary builds of V3, many of the current features have been slowly rolled out, starting with content-related features (for example photo gallery, additional blog tweaks and features) before moving through to AJAX and social-networking interactivity. For those interested in development, the project is open-source and available at GitHub, however currently no installer has been developed (hence the database SQL required to install is also not present - poke me and it might get done :P).

Boring Stuff 

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