Forum Moderators: coopster
It has two large sections of television, movies, celebrities, and its own custom forum. Its so involved and featured that i'm getting so frustrated.
I'm posting this as if anyone wants to share their opinions with creating super large involved websites, how long they took, success/negative stories, etc. I'm sort of getting a bit exasperated trying to get it all done.
That way a large site will probably not have that many different pages, maybe just one for each type of data you want to display, and a few for navigation etc. From then on its just a matter of typing in all of the data.
Then you can just change the html/code in one page, and have hundreds/thousands of pages appear different on the website.
I'm sure when I wake up, none of that will make sense anymore!
It was a MASSIVE project - and it is still growing and expanding.
A nice way to avoid burnout on a large project like that is to give yourself something "fun" to work on, and allow yourself a little time at the end of each day for it. For example, I took on a pro-bono Flash project for a local performance artist which kept me interested for over 5 months... and now I often spend the last half-hour of each work day on a complex astronomical ephemeris program that I'm building in PHP with a Flash/XML interface.
Another thing that only saves seconds at a time but adds up to many many hours saved: install your own Apache server, mySQL database, etc on your own machine! do your development locally (literally, at "localhost"), and only use the live/test server for the last round of debugging. I used to develop all my work via FTP at a remote server, so every time I wanted to run the script, it was FTP, FTP, FTP...
instead of
edit, save file, FTP, refresh browser
edit, save file, FTP, refresh browser
edit, save file, FTP, refresh browser
my pattern became
edit, save file, refresh browser
edit, save file, refresh browser
edit, save file, refresh browser
that one change in how I work has probably saved *weeks* of development time.
Honestly, I can empathize with your situation!
This is very good advice. I'm currently working on a large site that sometimes seems to have a mind of its own! There are certain things that I wrote 6 months ago that I have no idea how they work anymore, I'm not one for documenting code ;)
I found that making certain sections of the site interesting or fun makes it all a lot easier. You don't mind doing 5 hours of data cleansing or CMS programming if you can spend 2 hours inventing stupid apps that make use of the Google API :)
It's also a good idea to have roll-out phases for your site. For example my phase 1 site had the core of the content pages built and search engine friendly, this gave me a few months to work on phase 2 before the visitors started showing up.
Always try to make your code more "abstract" so it is as reusable as possible, because you never know when you might need it again. Instead of a function like "print_report_as_table()", create "print_table($report)" and pass it a "report" object. Or instead of writing a mainline code like "send_mail_to_admin()", create "send_mail($headers)" and pass it the admin info. Not only will you save time, but you will have more robust code that will outlive the current project (even if you don't - lol)
