Big Medium 2 (Almost) Ready for Blast Off (Global Moxie)

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Global Moxie is the hypertext laboratory of Josh Clark, a designer, developer, and author who offers workshops and consulting for iPhone app design. He’s also creator of Big Medium, a web content management system. Josh spins words and code from multimedia studios in Providence, RI, and Paris, France.

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Big Medium 2 (Almost) Ready for Blast Off

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Posted Aug 20, 2007

Photo by wiseacre photo.

I had it on the launch pad. The countdown was ticking. Tourists were ready with their cameras. In the final moments, though, I decided to scrub the launch for today. Just a few too many glitches for comfort here at mission control. Expect to see some action in a couple of days.

I was hoping to set free the first release candidate for Big Medium 2 today. I've been aiming for August 20 for several weeks, and friends, I came mighty close. This weekend, I put the finishing touches on Big Medium's new built-in search, and it's been humming away, smart and fast, on my development server.

Turns out that building a decent search is a complicated affair, full of scoring algorithms, character-encoding conundrums, and the mathematics of language. Or more accurately: languages... lots of languages. I've managed to wrangle most of these details, but they've given rise to some subtle issues that need to be sorted out elsewhere in the app. All of this has made for an engaging stint of coding but, alas, also a slight delay.

The search engine polishes off the planned features for Big Medium 2.0; thus the release candidate, the first "I think it's done" beta version. I'll be looking for testers to give the new update a pounding for show-stopper bugs while I develop a few additional designs for the theme library. I expect that there will be a handful of release candidates to follow, each with a slate of bug fixes. If all goes well, I still expect the final release to be ready in October.

Stay tuned, true-believers, I expect that Big Medium will ease back onto the launch pad later this week.

Tags: beta, bigmedium

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Comments

2 comment(s) on this page: Add your own comment below.

Thomas

Aug 21, 2007 9:36am [ 1 ]

Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! I knew sticking around would pay off..

Btw.. will you be releasing the API docs as well for the release candidate?

Josh

Aug 21, 2007 9:55am [ 2 ]

I don't plan to finish the polished API documentation until the final 2.0 release or shortly afterward. In the meantime, though, most of the Big Medium modules do include quite a lot of POD documentation already. If you're eager to get started right away with your own plugins and custom code for Big Medium, check out the documentation at the bottom of the files in the moxiebin/Modules directory, or look at the files in a POD reader.

Each file's documentation describes the objects and methods available for each Big Medium class, but it won't give you the broad overview of how they all work together. And it lacks tutorials. All of that will come with the final API manual. But at least it's a start; you can dig in by checking out these major components:

BigMed.pm
BigMed/App.pm
BigMed/App/Web.pm
BigMed/Data.pm
BigMed/Format.pm
BigMed/Content.pm
BigMed/Plugin.pm

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