Well, more than a year after I handed in my dissertation, I have re-started development on the CHUI project! So, what have I been up to? After finishing Uni I went back to my old job at Maplin Electronics for a few months in order to save up enough money to travel New Zealand with Kirstin. Travel we did, for six months (three of those spent camping in our 1.9kg tent). Plenty of photos on Flickr! for those who wish to know more. Back in England then and time to get a job! Thankfully it only took me three weeks to secure a position as Technical Developer at Data Media and Research, only a ten-minute walk from my house. I’m looking forward to my new job and learning Unix will be a handy skill for the future. I have some time to spare before I start work though, so I’m taking advantage of this and I’m currently working on moving all my web sites to a 1&1 server. This has also promted some development of CHUI. I’m about to release a general maintance and bug-fix update (v0.0.3100) which includes the following changes:
- Secure user log in system
- Cookies now enable CHUI to remember users
- User login/out link more personalised
- Compatibility with Linux server
- New Zealand inspired ‘Maori’ theme added
- Theme switcher improved, now saves theme preference
- Name-guessing (from e-mail address) algorithm improved
- Minor bug-fixes
I hope to continue development and future ideas include:
- More themes
- User sign-up facility
- IE6 compatibility
- Google mail module
- Possibly remove FTP (and POP3?) support
- Take more advantage of PHP5
- Improve security
- Possible addition of user layout profiles for different resolutions and devices
- Properly limit RSS display
- Improve RSS module in general, add ATOM support and maybe prev/next system
- Flickr thumbnails?
- and many more to come!
Looks like the secure user login system is going to have to wait a while as I only have a shared SSL certificate at the minute, meaning I can’t use cookies between domains and so my idea for secure user authentication will not work.
I have read about secure AJAX login systems that utilise client-side authentication… but what about devices that do not support JavaScript? Either I have to accept that these users must transmit their login information securely or I buy a dedicated SSL certificate… Is it worth it though? I’ll have to find out the price first. I would ideally prefer that the user’s entire session is secure, especially given that user’s may store their credentials for several different applications in their accounts…
More soon.