Last night when I was laying in bed I thought of a good idea for the file management system. It is a tracking system that keeps records of where a media item is being used, so say a picture is being used in three articles, when you view the page for that picture it will now list every article that it is used in. This helps keep things organized so you don't delete something that is being used in an article and you can also see what media items aren't embedded anywhere. Additionally, if someone browsing the media area finds something they find interesting, they can follow the link to the article it is used with. It also completes the circle where you can click on a media item in an article and go to the media item's dedicated page, as well as click the article(s) link on the media item's dedicated page and go to the article(s).

I think media wiki uses a similar tracking system, but I haven't peeked at their code to see how they do it. I do know that my code is probably about as efficient as possible since it only uses system resources when a user edits or adds an article. When that occurs, it examines the article for the embedded tags and populates the database table that tracks media usage accordingly. In any case, I'm pretty proud of this PHP file management system we have here at FIS. It was all created from scratch and works really well for our purposes and doesn't have a lot of the bloat that mediawiki and other systems have.

MuseumSyndicate.com now has all of its pages switched to the new layout so that is good. I still have to go through and update the code on some pages to XHTML and make some changes to cope with the size of the database so you don't have thousands of works of art listed on a single page. I will probably make those changes over the rest of the week and maybe add some new artwork by H.R. Giger and some other artists. I really like the changes so far since you can now easily click through an artist's collection using the previous and next buttons that I added. Before you would have to go back to the list and it made the process tedious. Other epic plans for the website include thumbnail views, support for multiple images per art work, and more tagging so things are better categorized.

I was able to fix the CSS so that the background renders properly for IE users. Before there was a black box below and between the DIVs instead of the background tile so it looked pretty bad. Now IE7 users should see the page render properly, but I don't know if it works in IE6 since I don't have that installed.

I've begun converting MuseumSyndicate.com to this same theme since it is sort of a subsidiary of FreeInfoSociety.com and it will make the two sites easier to maintain. I might change the theme more in the future to make it more distinct, but for now the only real difference is the sidebar options and the logo. So far only the most popular pages have changed. I still have to make some modifications to the scripts to make the giant lists of art span multiple pages and I also want to make some improvements to the layout so it is easier to move between pages.

I've made even more improvements, this time to forms. If you look on the right had side at the search box, you can see that it is now 1337 looking instead of plain jane. In the content submission area the same changes have been applied.

My brain is also cranking out a PHP algorithm that will display a list of sub-categories when you are displaying a list of files in a certain category. So, for example, when you are looking at e-books, right now the only way to access sub-categories is to click the links on the right side of the table, but you don't know what sub-categories there are unless you browse through the list. This will change that so that at the top of the page there is a small table listing the sub-categories under that category and how many files apply to each. So in a use case scenario, you want to look at only medicine textbooks in the e-books section. You would simply go to the e-books area and click medicine at the top of the page. Its not a big deal right now for most categories since there aren't a lot of files or sub-categories, but as the e-books and schematic archive sections get larger, it will make it much easier to browse.

As far as feedback on the site changes, so far it has mostly been positive. Some people miss the vault boy, but I'm not sure what to do. I am a fan of the Fallout series and find the vault boy illustrations amusing, but some people don't get it or think its irrelevant. I did receive one comment that the colors in the tables didn't match the sidebar and so forth, but I must point out that the entire theme is monochromatic, with shades ranging from black to white and grays in between. I may tweak the shading a bit more, but I think the overall theme looks good and most of the feedback seems to suggest that as well.