The upgrade of CSS Creator is complete. After failing with the previous attempt and having to roll back, success is good feeling.

Since the upgrade I have had a few minor issues to sort out but overall everything went pretty well. The trouble is after 4 years of posting and over 35,000 users the database is just getting too large and it will continue to grow. I may look at a way to archive old posts in the future, maybe find away to dump them in another database which would give me the freedom to move the archive database to another server if need be.

Oz in 30 Seconds a site by SpeakOut, designed by Damien, built by me with a little help from my friends John and Daniel, has been released and should be promoted in media around Australia over the next few weeks. The basic concept of the site is to allow members to upload a 30 second video, from which a chosen video will be played on national prime time television during the lead-up to the next federal election.

The site makes use of some cool Drupal modules such as FlashVideo which converts the video format to flash and creates a thumbnail of the video.

While testing the next version of Table Manager, which is badly in need of a new name, I once again have started adding new features. I have a simple test plan, basically a list of features or actions that need to be tested in different browser operating system combinations. Most of my testing at this stage has been while using the system to preform tasks for work etc. Occasionally while preforming a task I have an idea of a new feature which would simplify things, other times I come across features that are just plain missing. So my feature list of functionality to test gets longer and I have to start again at the top.

My latest additions have been MySQL user management related, things like adding users, changing passwords setting privileges etc. These are all handy features that I felt should be included so along with adding the functionality you need to check that the flow of menus and pages make sense.

Some of the features need to stand alone others work best when paired with something else and some need both. For example you can create a user as an isolated task but in reality a user without any privileges is a lonely user, so I am adding a button which will take you straight to grant privileges after a user is created.

Usually I develop on Linux then test on windows, this time things are around the other way. I am using my work laptop for the development (from home of course) and testing on my Linux system at home, hopefully I can get a work mac to test on once I have tied down the functionality. In most cases people will upload the system to a directory on there web server which will most likely be a Linux system of sorts with MySQL an PHP and Apache. So I need to throughly test that scenario. Testing on my local Linux box was going fine until I tried the backup functionality which works fine on Windows. At this stage I think it is just a path issue, more testing will tell.

So that's about where I am up to at the moment between work which has been getting really busy, family life and Aikido which is about to get back into full swing after a short break while Sensei visited Japan.

While testing the new version of the Table Manager IE managed to cause me some major headaches. Buttons should be pretty flexible tools for web forms, you can put markup between the opening and closing tags and the value attribute should be sent with the form not the markup or text between the tag opening and ending. So you can have multiple buttons in a form and only send the values of the button that was clicked. Now this would be great if only IE would play nicely.

The Easter break has given me a chance to start work once again on the PHP MySQL Table Manager. Some of the features I have been working on in the new version include: backup, restore and drop a database, save queries and results of queries and edit records inline. The features already available in previous versions include: create catabases, create tables, add, edit and delete records, modify tables, add and remove keys, columns etc. and write your own queries.