Another day, another bunch of func­tion­al­ity added to a thou­sand words. With the main public-facing inter­faces largely com­plete, I have moved on to the guts of the site’s user inter­ac­tion. The site now has work­ing, but ugly, imple­men­ta­tions of:

• E-mail address / pass­word authen­ti­ca­tion, with cookie sup­port based on a secret phrase gen­er­ated at registration.
• Reg­is­tra­tion itself, includ­ing the set­ting of a dis­play name (users authen­ti­cate with their e-mail address, so we need some­thing friend­lier to dis­play in the UI). Accounts are cre­ated in an unac­ti­vated state, and an e-mail is sent allow­ing the user to use their secret phrase to acti­vate the account (GET­ted via a “click here to acti­vate!” URL).
• Pic­ture sub­mis­sion, which adds the sub­mis­sion to a ‘queue’ table. In time there will be an admin inter­face for mov­ing items from the queue to the real pic­tures table, i.e. pro­mot­ing a sug­gested pic­ture to “pic­ture of the week” status.
• Story sub­mis­sion, which adds the story to the live site and takes you there after sub­mis­sion. There’s cur­rently no edit capa­bil­ity, and the pic­ture that the story is based on must be man­u­ally spec­i­fied by ID num­ber. (The lat­ter will become a scrol­lable jQuery list of all pictures.)

A story edit/delete inter­face is my next task, and once that’s done, the core func­tion­al­ity (exclud­ing any user profile-related code) will be largely fin­ished. After that there’ll be a period of test­ing and improv­ing the inter­faces of the new func­tions, before I put a call out for a cou­ple of will­ing guinea pigs to try and break the site for me! If any­one out there is expect­ing to be really bored some­time this week, let me know!