So what’s next? A couple of thoughts.

After a brief two-month break, OOTP Fantasy Leagues patch #3 sprung up pretty quickly last month and is now out. I only planned to fix a couple things, but ended up throwing in a lot of administrative features I knew site owners would want.

Put a fork in it – OOTP Fantasy Leagues gets moved to GitHub

With 0.3 I’ve also officially moved the source code to GitHub. Two reasons.

1. For my job, knowing Git and GitHub is going to be necessary. Someone we work for will be using it sometime soon.
2. The community. There are some good coders in the Github community and a lot of CodeIgniter projects are hosted there. Not a bad idea to try and tap that group to help further development.

So if you are a Git user, you can find the repository on GitHub at https://github.com/jfox015/OOTP-Fantasy-Leagues. Pull it, fork it. Hack away. The more eyes and thoughts on it, the better.

Next Steps

I still have a ton of things on my “to-do” list for the mod but I’ve come to a decisive point in the process. I could continue with the current code base which, while not great, is pretty clean and organized (thanks predominantly to it’s MVC nature and usage of CodeIgniter). I imported some things almost verbatim from StatsLab, which is not MVC based, which I’d like to clean up or rewrite altogether.

Then there’s some of the higher-level work. I want to expand on user management and give admins full control over users. The mod right now uses a hacked version of ReAuth, which is good, but just in patch #3, I fixed a couple glaring issues with the changes I made back in the summer of 2009.

Next, there’s my integrated CMS improvements. While they do allow for rapid creation of editor forms and provide powerful list and search capabilities, to truly make the mod work like a real CMS would take almost a complete tear down and rebuild. So at this point, I am turning to the web and more specifically GitHub.

To CMS or not too?

There are three projects that recently caught my eye and two of them are strong contenders towards being the auth system/cms backend I want to port the fantasy leagues too. FuelCMS is one. PyroCms is the other. Both are based on CodeIgniter and PyrcoCMs can claim some of the leading contributors to CodeIgniter as it’s own contributors.

What really is pulling me to look at and try out FuelCMS is it’s built-in ability to use either static view OR CMS pages in the database. It also allows you to convert static pages to CMS pages within the Admin tool. This sounds like just what I need for what I want to do with my mod.

The other consideration is my other online project that shares it’s CMS root with the Fantasy leagues mod, The Comic Rack, my online comic book database site. Although I personally conceded defeat to Graphic.ly before this actually became anything for public viewing, it’s still in the back of my head. And a solid back-end could be the thing to jump-start another look at getting it going.

Onward and upward

So that’s the state of things right now. A fourth patch is possible if some more big issues are found as people download and try out 0.3, but I’m tabling any new features until I decide on a direction for where the development of the overarching auth system will go. The demo’s are in progress. A decision is imminent.