Well it’s been one year since I started work on movopia, and in that one year, things have come a long way.

As some of you may know, I started a project called Gamed in December 2006. The idea was very similar to Yoyo Games where you could upload and share Games. I took on the project after the group based one, FreeFall gaming free through. However as time went on, I started to see some flaws in the project, most notably the lack of a virus scanner and Yoyo’s presence in the community. So I went in search of a new project, one that everyone could benefit from, that I’d have fun designing and required minimal effort to maintain. It was then that I thought of IMDB. At the time, I thought it was one of a kind (although I later found out about Rotten Tomatoes, movieTome and All Movie Guide) and would be perfect to copy. I thought of the name OpenTheatre and set to work on the 30th of May.

As you can see from the screenshot on the right, the interface was ugly, but that was only after a day’s work. One of the main features I wanted to have on the site was a place were people would be free to add and change movie information, without having to worry about moderated content.

I also wanted to have reviews listed on the main page (as you can see from the image), as opposed to IMDB where they were hidden. The final key feature I wanted to have was a mini-spreadsheet type program where people would be able to upload a list of the movies they own and share it with their friends or families.

The above design lasted a day, and the next morning I started work on the coding, without worrying about what the design would look like. I decided to do something different this time, and use a Templating engine to manage my pages. You can see an image of the movies page with the Templating engine on the right. I got partway through the website, and I realised that it just wasn’t working out. So I scrapped everything and started again - this time without a Templating engine.

So, I started it again, for the second last time. The design was very similar to the last one, with only a few minor changes. Unfortunately this time, I took a bit of a break from it, and when I returned I was unable to read any more of my code. Not only that, but in the past 8 months of development, I had learnt quite a few new tricks to optimise and speed up the site. So, I started one last time, the current design. I started completely from scratch, with a brand new design (which I won’t reveal just yet) but I am on track to getting in finished sometime soon.

In the coming weeks, I’ll explain the three key features of the site, how they work, and what they’ll do. I’ll also start to post some screenshots, and aim for a beta sometime this year.

Garion's blog is 100% Australian owned, produced and hosted.

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