[phpesp-dev] Re: Join project/more suggestions

[James E. F. <jf...@ac...>]

On Tue, 25 Jun 2002, Creative Minds wrote:

> Hi James,
>
> Perhaps you have noticed my interest in the phpESP
> project through my posts in the development mailing
> list (Creative Minds).
>
> I'd like to help out if I can. I actually installed
> Apache and MySQL and PHP in order to try the stuff out
> and perhaps pick up on PHP in order to contribute.
>
> However I believe I would be able to contribute a lot
> in the designing phase of functionality rather than as
> a developer. Would you be interested in having me
> joining and send a lot of feature requests?

Looks like you've already sent the feature requests. ;)
Clearly people submitting code is more useful, it's pretty
easy to say "I want this!", but much more difficult for the
developers to find time to write/test/release the code.
Everyone is a volunteer on this project -- and I assume
most (including myself) have real, full-time jobs which
cuts down time to work on phpESP quite a bit. But it never
hurts to let us know what you'd like to see be done, and
one of us might actually do it. =)

> For instance, I noticed a suggestion of implementing
> javascript to the checkbox if someone types anything in
> the field next to it. May I recommend not using
> Javascript as some browsers have incompatibility with
> it or let's say problems with it. My suggestion in this
> case would be to keep it simple.

Well, there is very minimal JS in phpESP. I detest JS, and
browse in with it disabled 99% of the time. However
sometimes there just aren't any clean solutions, and JS is
the least of several evils (the main other evil being the
lag/complexity of POSTing back to the server and
maintaining server side state).

> I also have a lot of ideas on the input of new
> questionnaires.  How about having a GUI and a
> simplified scriptmethod of doing it.

Details? Mock-ups? Have you seen the recently committed GUI
changes from Kon? (Check out the devel version from CVS.)

> Not to mention I have loads of interesting fully
> functional research software with documentation that
> might come in handy as reference material during the
> development.

Cool, as long as you don't go violating any of their
license agreements.

> What do you think?

The randomization option is probably not that difficult,
but would probably have to change the database schema.
Omitting options from the randomization is a pain. Ranking
questions as you describe would need JS. Percentage could
be implemented with "!other" if necessary. Project overview
seems quickest of the bunch, quite simple  --- you could
tackle this if you want to get your hands dirty learning
PHP.

Can you tell me more about your background, mainly, do you
know PHP,SQL,CGI,HTML,JS,CVS,Perl etc...

> // Creative
> Minds

-James
 (Sent to list because these are devel issues ...)