DVDFriend.us - Making Progress

The site now allows for the adding of ratings and reviews. Yesterday I altered the GUI a bit. It looks like a third grader did it, which is better than usual.

Of the entire spectrum of colors visible to the human eye, I have limited myself to just these:

silver
dimgray
black
white
yellow
steel blue
and, for special occasions, red

I started adding some per-use controls such as "Reviews Auto Approved" and "New Product Auto Approved". In a more mature system, this would be dictated by roles based security, but that's overkill at this point. A few simple flags will suffice for now.

When a text box is selected, and you press enter, you expect it to activate the appropriate button. So, if you're typing in the search field and press enter, you expect it to search. ASP.NET 1.1 didn't do that on its own. Some javascript was needed. I started to write that javascript today, then slowed down and did some research. ASP.NET 2.0 offers a new DFAULT BUTTON property at the container level, which is handy.

I also added a NEWS section on the left hand side. Only admin users can add new NEWS items. (Again, this could be via RBS, but not yet).

All the blog entries (reviews, news, etc) are stored in one table. You define zones and associate them some blog types. I created one zone for the news on the left side of the page. It contains only the news blog type. The center zone contains all blog types except for news. The center zone is drawn by a repeater on the default.aspx. The news is drawn by an ASCX. You set the zone and the title, and it takes care of the rest.

I had a little trouble with the ASCX at first. There's an object data source and a repeater. The ODS points to an object which users Enterpriese Libary to return a datatable. It's pretty straight forward (thanks to the ODS), but it wouldn't bind. I found that the ODS was accidentally within an H1. Whoops.

The search needs some work. Currently, its tailored to searching for a product that you want to write about. You may also just want to read about it, or get pricing, etc. In that scenario, it should take you to the as-yet non-existent product page.

So, lots to do, but picking away...