The Mango Initial Release is drawing near. I’ve resumed work on the project I was getting all fired up about last year – thanks to my wife – and it’s looking really good.
A few things about the plan have changed, however. First, I decided that for now, I’m just targeting me as an audience for this thing. Trying to program it in a way that would work for the whole world was stressing me out and slowing down development. My wife snapped me out of a funk one night when I was lamenting my predicament by asking, ‘Why don’t you just make it for you and don’t worry about selling it?’
It was the best advice I ever listened to – it made me remember why I started this. I suddenly knew the direction I wanted to go in. I got my spark back.
Thanks, Lovie.
This doesn’t mean that Mango is dead or anything. I’m still going to release it to the public under one of the open source licenses, but whether or not I try to turn it into a money making adventure remains a question that I’m not too concerned with right now. Right now I’m excited because I’ve got the following features in there now:
- WYSIWYG editor – TinyMCE
- Multiple file uploads with progress bars for each file – SWFUpload
- Multimedia attachment to Pages – Anarchy Web Player (not sure if I’m staying with this or if I will roll my own)
- Full YAHOO UI integration for a great look and feel and intuitive, responsive interfaces.
- A basic authentication system
- All the usual stuff that wikis have.
I still need to have a search feature, but I might leave that for the second realease. Mostly, I’m trying to concentrate on the most important part: making editing pages easy and fun. I need to run through things tomorrow and figure out what needs to be locked down better. I’m sure I’ve got security holes in it right now. once I plug those, I’ll put it online and start checking in new versions periodically as I reach stable milestones.
It feels really good to be working on this right now. My wife has been very supportive, which helps a lot. Almost every day I come home, put down my stuff, crack open the laptop, and start hammering away at it. I’ve even gotten the alias ‘Wiki-man’ recently.