The hardest thing to know is where to start.

So you remember this thing yesterday? Well, The project-space is up, as the currently somewhat-unimaginatively-titled FenPress α. It's currently an extremely raw WP-MU install, but it covers the basics of that platform. You can:

• Sign up.
• Create a blog.
• Crosspost your blog to the single LJ Server account of your choice.
• Muck about with a suite of plugins and themes.
• Create as many secondary blogs as you want.
• Create shared secondary blogs.

Now. The hard part. And the problem I've had ticking over in my head since last night is where the hell do I even start? I know what features people want and – theoretically, at least – I know how to write them. But the interoperability sucks, because everything is so dependant on everything else.

Oh, and the LJ cross-poster uses a depreciated function I don't know how to replicate; hooray. But I've fudged it and works for now (I think).

So. Where to start? I think a lot of my problems come back to the fact that WP doesn't have a real concept of an easily-accessible profile page. So that's a good start. If someone's got a profile page then you can friend them. So I can work on the friends system. Then, with that in place, I can work on post permissions. Similarly, I can do a "join this blog" option for group blogs (a.k.a. communities).

The one thing I think might give me issues is an equivalent of a friends page. WP MU assigns every blog a different suite of tables, which looks like it might mean a huge and complex array of joins. Then again, it does have a "last updated journals" list, and really an f-list is similar to that, only filtered. So, we'll see. But the perms stuff comes first.

Small steps. The biggest hurdle here is learning the WP API. The code itself is simple.

Mirrored from v-s.net. Comments are preferred on the original.