Final-fucking-ly! The Twin Cities has finally seen 50 for the first time since the middle of November. The Vernal Equinox is next Thursday and so is the end of the quarter, and maybe, just maybe I can start working on something. I've been feeling the itch to do something other than my school work. The opportunity seems to be presenting itself, despite some unnecessary turmoil on the job. At any rate, I'm making this post more as an announcement about a project that I've been working on since the middle of February.

I don't know how many people who are watching my journal are really into web development or for that matter, have heard of Wordpress, a popular and very flexible blogging engine that can double as a lightweight CMS. I'm using it to manage my webcomic, Silent Shadow and I came up with an idea for my final project in Dynamic Web Apps to extent Wordpress so it can be used as both a blog and a comic manager. Well, six weeks (and nearly 40 hours of work) later, I am almost ready for the beta release. I'm supposed to present the project in class on the 20th, and I have plans to release the plugin on the 23rd, but I'm thinking of holding off till the end of the month so I can shake a few more bugs out and maybe even clean up the source code, and create a default theme that works with the plugin.

Features:
* Comic banner generation
* Easy comic browsing navigator
* Upload comic/create post in one function
* Multiple series (version 2)
* Image managment functions (version 2)

That last feature is actually going to be a seperate project but its going to be implemented into the plugin eventually. Its going to be "wrapper" class for the GD image managment library that is usually included by default with PHP. I got the idea for it after working with ezSQL, which is an open-source wrapper class that makes using the MySQL functions in PHP alot easier. The thing with GD library is it's flexible but there are so many functions that it kind of makes your head spin when you first start to work with it. Anyway, the Wordpress Comic Plugin (to give its full development name) will be released sometime in the next few weeks. I'll announce it here, and on the Silent Shadow website Silent-shadow.net.