Plan, Prepare, Present. – The Planning Stage.

Well, the title is a little misleading. It’s not about a wonderful new presentation or a new technique, but a little saying I came up with to summarize my design/development process. Now, the next answer, what am I designing? I am rebuilding my blog in Flash as the front-end and keeping WordPress as the back-end. This is something I have been meaning to do, and as I told the guys at AKQA I was going to do it, I thought I might as well do it and get a major project in my portfolio :)

When researching the internet I found that one of the best ways to get data from WordPress, is to use the XMLRPC method. The actual implementation of this will come in another post, but thats the way I’m doing. I will also be using this set of classes for all the WordPress/SWF communication.

The Planning Process.

I first started with a basic function diagram on the wall, in which I came up with 7 different files and listed all the functions within them. After that I fired up Microsoft Offive 2007 Visio and created a more complete diagram with function names and descriptions in them. Here’s the finished diagram in Visio.

The main trouble I had with the design/plan process was that I kept thinking I was making the backend as well so I kept adding in things like ‘Add Post’ but obviously, as it’s just a template, it’s not needed ;) So there you can see what functionality will be in the template, but all implimented in Actionscript 3.0. This doesn’t include the transitions, layout and stuff like that, but that is all to come.

The whole process to me a few hours with gaps in between and a heavy dose of relaxing music. It’s not fully complete as it’s late (I’m writing this at 1am ;) ) so I need to properly check it and proof read it tomorrow. Please let me know if you see anything wrong with it let me know!

Before I crash out I thought I say a little about the title. Plan, Prepare, Present basically translate into Design/Visualize, Code It, Go Live. Now you have probably worked that out but I thought it was quite cool so, well, there you go!

Good Morning :) Harry.