Milestone Reached - Games Module Complete
This week sees another milestone crossed off the list - having pretty much completed the games module. Well, that’s not entirely true, as there’s a few dependencies on the core games engine before I can finalize some of the pages, but the main meat of the games pages are complete.
Remaining development milestones:
Development: Framework CompleteDevelopment: Games Module Complete- Development: User Login/Management Module Complete
- Development: Core Games Engine Complete
- Development: Social Networking Module Complete
- Development: Community Module Complete
- Development: Email Module Complete
- Development: First Pass Functionality Complete
Other than the main search engine, the remaining pages in the games module that I’ve built this week are:
- Browse games list
- Similar to the existing board games list on this preview site, but more geared around finding a game and tying this into the core games engine.
- This also includes an alphabetical index so you can quickly find- or scroll through the list- to get to the game you want.
- Submit a new game
- I’ve done a fair job building up the initial games list from a number of sources, but as you know, new board games are released all the time!
- In pre-empting games being added, and trying to automate as much as possible, the site needs a facility for users to submit new games - this isn’t as simple as it sounds however…
Submitting a New Game
One of the core design features of this board games site is to only have a boardgame listed once - duplication will lead to confusion (what you’re not confused already ? 
). Thus there’s a number of steps to the new game submission process:
- Check if the game to be submitted is already listed - basically we reuse the search and soundex facilities we’ve already built!
- If not already listed, then we check the game hasn’t already been submitted by someone else (including if it sounds like a game that’s already submitted - this soundex is proving more useful than I thought!)
- If the game has been already submitted, there’s no point submitting it twice - so I add you to a queue of people waiting to be notified when the game is ready to be approved.
- If the game hasn’t been already submitted, then I add the game to the queue ready for me to take a look and approve. Behind the scenes I get an email to let me know that there’s something waiting!
 Step 1 |
 Step 2 |
 Step 3 |
 Step 4 |
Amazing how things escalate in functionality when you really start to think about them - this page was going to be a simple form where you fill it out and send me an email. I guess it could have been that, but looking at what’s there now, spending some time automating this stage as much as possible saves me a lot of work in the future!
Where Next?
Aha! I’m two steps ahead of you. I’ve spent the last few days trying to design the main games engine and testing how this will be represented in the database. There’s some complex data modeling issues to deal with here, but I made some great progress today - more about this next week!
Add Your Comment