*GASP* I know, hard to believe, but it’s true.

While no one has come to me and mentioned it specifically, I know from other places on the Internet that people are frustrated with the installation process with Nova. SMS has spoon-fed users for years now by generating the database connection file for them. Unfortunately, those users weren’t around in the SMS 1 days when, like Nova, you had to edit a file not only for your database connection, but for your site messages too. Still, SMS sort of got the installation thing right … sort of.

On more than one occasion, someone would come to the support forums, hat in hand, wanting help because they’d accidentally overwritten their database connection file (you all know who you are). The solution to the problem was to run the first step of the install process again to re-generate the variables file. Simple enough. Of course, on more than one of those occasions, people would continue through the process and wonder why the hell they had two of everything now. So the biggest problem was that SMS tried to do everything in one fell swoop. In that instance, less wasn’t more. Then, if someone decided to change servers, they had to manually edit the variables file again to change the parameters. It works, but it could be easier.

Enter Nova 2.

Nova 2 takes that good part of SMS (writing the database connection file) and fixes it to make it better. What does it look like? Pretty simple actually. The system will be able to tell right away if it’s installed or not and if it isn’t, it’ll redirect to a brand new installation page that’ll walk you through setting up your database connection file. Sound a lot like SMS at this point? That’s because it’s just about identical. Fill out your connection parameters and hit the button. Instead of trying to write the file immediately, Nova 2 does things smarter and stores all that information in a nice little session then creates a connection to the database with those values. Why? That allows Nova to check and see if your connection settings are right before it writes the file. If they aren’t, Nova can tell you right away if it’s your username/password, the name of your database, the database host or a general error. If anything is wrong, you can go back to the form (with all your values pre-populated) and make changes. Once you think you have it all set, submit it again and it’ll try connecting again.

You finally have a successful connection to the database, so now Nova will attempt to write your file. If it works, you’re all set and you can go and start installing Nova. If your server doesn’t support writing the file, you’ll be given the text to copy and paste into the connection file. Once you’ve pasted the text, saved the file and uploaded it to your server, there’s a final verification (only if the file wasn’t written by the server) that you can connect to the database. Once you’ve connected, you’re on your way and the installation can continue.

Nova 2 really tries to be as smart as possible about how it does this step of the process since it’ll end up being the first impression people have about Nova 2. Doing it like SMS would’ve been easy, but taking the extra time to make the whole process work smarter was worth it. These are the kinds of changes that Nova 2 will (hopefully) be full of. Little things that help Nova work smarter, not harder.

Thanks to everyone for your patience and understanding (and lots of help) as I work through these issues.

Still, any good developer  knows you can’t just focus on today or next week, you have to be looking beyond that.  Developers that don’t do that either code themselves into a corner or fall way behind the market because they aren’t thinking far enough ahead.  I want to avoid both of these things, so even before Nova was finished, I started putting together some notes on where I wanted to take Nova.  There have been tons of suggestions for new features over the last year and all of them are on the list, but for me, it’s important to look at the big picture and figure out where I want to take Nova and the best way to get there.  After a lot of debate and looking through everything, Nova finally has a direction and I guarantee it isn’t the direction anyone expects.

So Where Are We Going?

The version of Nova being released next week is version 1.0 and it’ll be the only version in Nova 1.

Wait, what?

Besides bug fixes to Nova 1.0, my focus will be entirely on Nova 2 starting next week.  (Some of you may have noticed the Nova 2 page on the new Anodyne site and all this blog post is is another way of getting that information out.) This is a case of knowing where I want to take Nova and needing to take drastic steps to get it to that point.  Is it possible that there could be a 1.1 or 1.2 version in the future?  Sure, but it isn’t the focus.  After Nova 2, I’ll evaluate whether or not I’ll go back to Nova 1 for anything.

What To Expect

The next logical question is what should you expect from Nova 2?  It’s early, but the following things are certain:

PHP

On the server, Nova 2 will require PHP 5.2.3 or higher.  In the next few weeks, I’ll be releasing a Nova 2 server verification utility through AnodyneXtras that’ll tell you whether your server can run Nova 2.  Why so early?  If you’re on a server that isn’t able to run Nova 2 because of the version of PHP running, it gives you plenty of time to talk to your host about the possibility of upgrading PHP on the server to the necessary version.  As the requirements change, the utility will be updated, but the PHP version shouldn’t change.

But that only answers half the question.  Why PHP 5 only?  The fact is PHP 4 is dead.  PHP 4 was released in 2000, and last had a serious functional update in 2003.  In fact, the last update to PHP4 at all was in August of 2008.  That’s nearly 2 years since the last update to PHP 4 and version 4 was declared end of life in December of 2007.  That’s a long time to support a technology that’s no longer viable.

PHP 4 was a good technology in its day, but today, we rely on things like XML and JSON which aren’t well supported in PHP 4.  XML support in 4 is slow and difficult.  4 doesn’t include any support for JSON.  These cause issues and waste time when developers have to develop solutions that work in all version of PHP.  Because of these issues, Anodyne is saying goodbye to PHP 4 with Nova 2.  In fact, Anodyne is officially joining the GoPHP5 initiative and all future products will assume PHP 5.2 or higher.

Browsers

For browsers, Anodyne is going to again get aggressive and drop all support for IE 7.  While there is no release date for IE 9 yet, our stats indicate that the majority of IE users are using version 8.  Also given some of IE 7’s shortcomings, going to 8 and higher eliminates a bunch of code and hacks to get things to work properly.

A New Architecture

To put it simply: I’m dropping CodeIgniter and moving to another framework.  Don’t get me wrong, I love CodeIgniter and would recommend it in a heartbeat to anyone who asked.  However, CodeIgniter still supports PHP 4 and doesn’t have some of the really slick features the new framework does.  With the move to PHP 5, the new framework is the logical step to take.  (This massive change should explain why Nova needs to move to 2.0 instead of something in the 1.x line.)  There will be tons of information about the framework and the benefits of such a change in future blog posts.

Features

Interestingly, I’m debating right now whether there will be any new features in Nova 2 or if it’ll simply be a file update.  There’s some time to figure that out, but it’s possible Nova 2 may have zero new features and instead save new features for 2.1.  Again, there will be lots of information about Nova 2 features (or lack thereof) in the future.

Should I Even Bother With 1.0?

Yes, yes and yes.

The port to the new framework will take anywhere between 9 and 12 months, so there’s a lot of time with 1.0.  Plus, SMS support will get dropped in about 6 months.  If you chose not to upgrade to Nova, you’d be stuck with a product Anodyne doesn’t actually support.  No one wants that, so Nova 1 is the way to go.  This is just a heads up that Nova 2 is coming and to give people the opportunity to help us work out all the bugs as it’s developed.

There’s lot more info coming soon…

This is a moment that’s been years in the making and I’d like to thank everyone who was involved.  At their very cores, both SMS and Nova are labors of love and it’s incredibly satisfying to actually release Nova to the world.  I watched with bewilderment and some of the amazing things people did with SMS and I’m looking forward to more of the same with Nova.

Head over to the main site to grab a copy of Nova 1.0 and enjoy. 

What happens then? Sleep. The last couple of weeks have pretty much been a schedule of work all day, come home and make dinner, work on Nova and Anodyne stuff until anywhere between 12 and 1 in the morning. Sleep and repeat. So after midnight tonight, I’ll be soundly asleep while everyone starts to play. Beginning around 7:30am tomorrow, I’ll be actively monitoring the forums and will be in IRC for most of the day tomorrow. (I’ll post a mibbit link or instructions for getting in to IRC tomorrow.) No doubt there will be a ton of questions about Nova, so I’ll do my best to get them answered as quickly as possible. Any bugs that are discovered will be logged and prioritized based on their severity. Hopefully there’s nothing too severe, but only time will tell.

Happy Nova Day!

The documentation efforts with SMS started out with the best of intentions.  I created a simple wiki that was supposed to house tons of tutorials, skinning information, FAQs and all sorts of things.  At first, a bunch of stuff was added, but slowly, it failed to be maintained and new material was added only as a stopgap measure when lots of people were asking the same questions.  The single biggest failing of SMS was its lack of documentation or a user guide.

Fast forward year and a half later and I was sitting at my desk with a blank sheet of paper starting to jot down my initial ideas for what was then called SMS 3.  Even though I hadn’t even released SMS 2.6 at that point, I knew that figuring out the Nova feature set early was critical.  The first item that went on the list was genres.  The second item was documentation.  From the start, I considered a full user guide as one of the top 5 most important things to be done for Nova.  I’ve accomplished just that with Nova’s user guide.

It’s not just a comprehensive user guide, it’s nearly exhaustive.  Almost every page in the system has been documented, even if it’s just to say what the page is for.  For complex pages, the user guide goes into great detail about the various functions available on the page.  Admin pages highlight what access levels are needed to manage the page.  Related pages are shown at the bottom.  If the page exists in the system, odds are it has a page guide associated with it.  But it didn’t stop there.

Nova is an MVC (Model-View-Controller) system, so doing page guides only covered the VC of that.  What about the M?  After all, some developers may want to make custom page that use the already-built models in Nova.  That’s why I spent weeks painstakingly going through the models to document every public method (private methods aren’t documented because they should be used directly).  That means that if a developer wants to do something with a built-in model, they can look it up and see the parameters and what it returns.  Did it stop there?  Hell no.

Libraries that are used by Nova have been documented, including our own Auth library so that developers can tap in to the various libraries available from inside Nova.  Nova uses a lot of icons, so it made sense to put together an image index of all the icons used in the system, the name of the icon (in case someone want to use seamless substitution to override that icon) and the pages the icon is used on.  Nova’s database schema is huge … over 3 times larger than the SMS database schema, so it only made sense to put together a comprehensive guide to the database structure, including the columns, their types, defaults, name and description.  There are install, upgrade and update guides, all very thorough.  The tutorial scene is significant and cover a ton of details about the system from the get go:

• Configuring CodeIgniter
• Configuring Nova
• Nova Folder Structure
• Nova URLs
• How to read Nova’s version numbers
• Genres in Nova
• A Backup Guide
• An in-depth series about extending Nova
• An in-depth series about skinning Nova including a 5 part skinning how-to tutorial
• A series about models in Nova
• Advanced tutorial topics that include changing the application folder, removing the index file from the URL, translating Nova, creating a rank set and creating/modifying libraries and helpers

Nova’s user guide was a serious feature and something that wasn’t taken lightly.  Documentation is easily the most difficult thing to do for a project like Nova, but if done right, can set the system apart.  Make sure to check out the Nova user guide at http://docs.anodyne-productions.com.

Image galleries is one of those little features that could easily go unnoticed for weeks or even months if someone didn’t say something about them.  Nova keeps the SMS functionality of being able to assign multiple images to a character and display them as a small gallery.  But, taking that concept a step further, Nova also lets admins easily use the same gallery concept for mission images and tour images.  SMS allowed three tour images, but sometimes, you want more than that, so Nova gives you the ability to put as many images with a tour item as you want.  Missions are the same way.

What’s even better is that these three items are all tied in to the image upload system, so adding a bunch of images to a tour item is really just as simple as clicking on the file name from inside the images tab when you’re editing the items.

Sub departments are departments within departments.  To highlight how useful sub departments are, let’s build a situation to use them.  Let’s say you’re running an RPG with a fighters.  It’s a big ship, so you have 100 fighters assigned to the vessel and those 100 are broke down into squadrons.  In Nova, you don’t have to spend all kinds of time organizing the positions so all the various squadron positions are next to each other, you can simply create a new sub department.  When you go to create a new department, there’s an option to select a parent department, or in other words, the department in which the sub department will be added.  Once the sub department is created, you can assign positions to it or create new positions just for that sub department.  (Unfortunately, if you have 10 fighter squadrons, you’d need to create 10 pilot positions, one for each sub department.)  After that, just assign your characters to the right positions and you’re good to go.

When you check out the manifest, you’ll see any positions in the fighter department that aren’t part of a sub department, then like departments are displayed, you’ll see, indented slightly, the various sub departments associated with that department.

At this point, Nova doesn’t allow sub departments to have their own sub departments (a.k.a. nested sub departments).  We may add this functionality in a future version of Nova as well as the ability to assign departments positions to multiple groups without re-creating the position.

Position Updates

Easily one of the biggest UI updates is to the position management.  SMS forced admins to change the number of open position slots with a number in a text field.  It works, but there was a better way.  Again leaning on jQuery’s UI library, open position slots are now handled through a simple slider with a range from zero to fifty.  Want more slots open for a position?  Just drag the slider until you have enough open positions and click Update.

Update All

For admins, one of the biggest gripes about SMS is when updating positions, departments and ranks that they have to take action on each item individually instead of updating all items on the page and updating them at once.  Nova does away with that behavior.  Update everything on the page, click the button once and everything is done.

New Form Layout

Forms in SMS were laid out with the label to the left and right-aligned.  It certainly wasn’t a bad way to do it.  Forms can be tricky to design from a user experience point of view.  When you get a lot of form fields, using labels to the left can get messy and confusing for someone filling out the form.  I could’ve left forms in Nova alone and been fine, but after an experiment with grouping a form’s field label above the field itself, I was sold that Nova’s forms needed to be updated.  Now, most of the forms in Nova put the label above the field.  Doing this makes moving through the forms easier than left-aligned labels.

The New Join Page

One of the biggest UI changes is probably the join form.  SMS displayed everything all at once, but that can definitely be daunting to fill out.  To make it a little less daunting, the new join form is broken down in to several tabs.  The first tab is player information, the second tab is basic character information, the third tab is the rest of the character information and the fourth tab is other information, like the sample post question.  In addition to breaking things into the tabs, Nova uses a Next Step button to move through the form easily.  It’s definitely a new way of laying out the join form, but it makes the form less daunting.