KnowledgeTree progress

I see Brad has been commenting on our progress on KnowledgeTree. To paraphrase Brad: The past week rocked. My moderately technically interesting but pretty much boring KT3 back-end work met Brad's inspired UI layer work, and suddenly all our over-the-pool-table dreaming solidified and we couldn't help but fall in love with it.

This (Thursday) morning should see the final folder action completed on my side and Brad finishing the administration component.

KT 2.0.7 had 40k lines of code in its presentation layer. Today, it has 17.5k lines of code. And maybe 2.5k lines of templates. Half the amount of code for more functionality. That more than anything is the metric that is telling me we're on the right track. And the fact it's devastatingly beautiful in the UI, and beginning to look quite pretty in the back-end.

Tomorrow I should also finish the subscription plugin. The whole subscription system is now just another plugin. That means that we can let people go wild making subscriptions work the way they want, and they don't need to muck around in tons of core files, potentially introducing bugs. The only remaining work is moving the last few times it is directly used into triggers.

I'm really looking forward to documenting the plugin system. And am really looking forward to people wanting plugins and seeing whether we've catered for everything. I think we're quite close now.

Brad has really got me interested in using bzr for my work locally. I can see it being incredibly useful, even if still working on upstream "legacy" CVS or Subversion systems. He pretty effortlessly managed his own private branch in between my fumbling to understand how to implement our grand plans for KT3, and the UI merge was pretty much painless.

I'm in a good place at the moment. Bringing mad plans to fruition is quite rewarding.