Last time we left off, the "article organizer" feature was just getting started. The drag and drop functionality was only worth acknowledging as having the ability to move an element from list to grid. It was anybody's guess what would happen to a article if you were to drop one on top of it. There was also some CSS issues that would occur when leaving the draggable state.

Those were kind of just the issues that appeared as a result of the first pass at trying to develop this section of a page builder. Reading the dnd-kit libraries documentation turned out to be wildly fruitful in my understanding of the tooling I'm using. Navigating the oddities was fun.

The last update was Sunday and today's ~~Wednesday~~ Thursday, there hasn't been much progress to report on the project what with my girlfriends mom being in town, and my regular 9-5 getting the best of my brain power. Like always, I've got a few updates worth documenting.

Whatcha building

oh yeah to recap what I've been working. I have this project Chroniconl, which is essentially just a blog. I've been hand-rolling all of the features for it, building the kind of platform that I can and have spent 5+ hours at a time working in. The UI has gone through several iterations over the last few months in an attempt to build what feels right, but that's a whole other story to tell.

The last few articles I've been documenting my journey as I plan and develop a sub feature for administrative users within the application. Consider this documented journey as a "mini series" in the grand scheme of the Chroniconl blog. It would be nice to be able to group these few articles together into a specific section of the blog, with its own unique title and description. Similar to how YouTube channel owners have the ability to create playlists and publish them to a channel.

The current feature (that doesn't really have a name), is being developed as an interactive interface for administrative users to come in and create groups of content. Admin users can publish the content groups on the blog.

Bug reports

I was rambling about all the bugs i created in the UI during the first pass at the drag and drop behavior. Fixing those bugs was essentially all that I was able to accomplish throughout the week, what with work and all.

The bugs were primarily around the drag and drop behaviors a user might encounter when working in the app. I don't think most folks really care about the exact technical challenges that were encountered. What's important to note: The application is once again, bug free.

Moving forward

I'm getting a more concert understanding of the potential here and how it can be shaped into a feature. There's a few more guard rails that should be setup before even I can call it complete.

See, initially when I first set out to create this feature, there wasn't a definitive vision for how the admin side should behave and function. There was chatter of a command line utility as a starting point, but that never panned out. Really, it was only clear that I wanted to control the order of how my blog posts appear, beyond the most recent.

Now I'm thinking about using this as a way of creating multiple sections in the blog, instead of just one. The "section manager" will be responsible for managing a given heading, subheading, and collection of articles. Administrative users will be able to create multiple sections that can be displayed on the blog in any order.

Still not entirely sure how this will all pan out, but I'm getting closer. I've picked up a few other projects that I'll be working on in between this one and my day job, we'll see how far I can get this weekend.

Cheers!

Less Buggy Prototype Software