That was a pretty good evening actually. Went to my most favourite place in Camden (and currently in all of London as well) Tupello Honey, had some fantastic carrot cake straight from the over, PLENTY of icing on top, and a nice cappuccino. So I’m sitting there with Alfonso and we’re discussing our ‘other’ lives outside the office. See the fonz is a kindred spirit in that sense, he’s got just as much crap going outside of work as me; due to being older however he’s mastered how to deal with a lot of it… I haven’t…yet.

Wrote the list of things to do. I don’t know about everyone else but I’ve write loads of these, sometimes I make a dent in them, othertimes not really. The thing is though, wrote all of them and started prioritizing the items. Strange but everything’s kind of fallen into place. I do know exactly what is required at this point in time for me. It’s very clear to me, at the same time it’s going to be hard to stay on the actual direct line of action I’ve drawn up.

Development of Manji is actually only for tonight. I’m pleased to say 98% of it is complete. In fact I can probably go live pretty soon with version 1.0, however as Alphaoide (more on him later) pointed out, some more work needs to be done in cleaning up the php files, to fit into the theme structure that Ryan Boren has set up through his example of Kubrick.

So the question I have to ask myself is this:

• Does it validate? Xhtml and css? Yes on both accounts.
• Does it look the same in Firefox and IE? Yes completely and utterly (really happy about that).
• Have I sorted out all the little bugs and gotten it to have all the features I wanted it to have in the beginning? Yes, all comments from the boards etc have been integrated more or less.
• Is the CSS clean and clear for editing purposes? Damn straight. A lot of work in cleaning this little baby up making it soo simple to edit. Once you see it you'll all understand.

So what’s the problem? Well while the php works fine, there is the problem that it’s not as polished as I would like it to be. This last part can be what’s on for the next stage of development as we get closer to a wordpress 1.3 release. More questions will be asked about the template system and so it will get more clear to me what is required and what is not. Please bear in mind that until 6 months ago I’d never really dealt with php, so I think I’ll need some more time to get my head around it all. It’s damn powerful stuff, and I wish I understood it more but hey I’m going on small overload here, which is why I had asked Root to help me out originally.

Which brings me back to Alphaoide (see told you I’d get back to him). Behind the scenes the man has been an absolute gem. He’s been answering all my dumbass questions and solving all the problems that I’ve had, which has prompted me to ask him if he’d be interested in joining me on my next project. I’ve also asked Chris Davis to join in on this little project as well, which he seems keen on just seems the man’s been pretty busy lately, but I’m hoping he’ll join in as well because I think he’d be great to have on the team.

So what is it I’m talking about you ask? The tentative title of the project (and most of you know that I’m pretty bad when coming up with names), is Shuttle. What is Shuttle? Simply, it’s going to be a brand new spanking interface for the Wordpress Admin Control Panel. I’m sorry Matt, I love you, but the Wordpress interface is something to me that is sorely lacking in style and sometimes functionality. I don’t think there are that many people (except if they’re serious coders and really don’t care what it looks like) that really love the aesthetics of the Wordpress Control Panel.

I’m going to admit something, and that’s the fact that I nearly didn’t go for Wordpress over Textpattern due to the weak interface. What can I say I’m a shallow designer, who places a lot on the actual appearance. What actually kept me was the fact that the Wordpress community was absolutely buzzing. I just had one look at the boards, and knew that if there was a question I needed it would be answered, and that was reassuring, however I’ve never liked the Control Panel, and well I don’t think it’s really on Ryan’s or Matt’s minds right now, so it’s up to the rest of the community to sort it out. That’s where the Shuttle Team come into play.

What’s the ETA on this? Don’t ask silly questions, you won’t get silly answers. To be fair I think it will be at least 2 months down the line, hopefully less, but I’m being realistic about all of this. So why mention all of this now you ask? Well as this is something that is effectively user based I’d really like to hear which plugins, functions whatever you use, used to use or whatever from other blogging systems (just name them) or whatever that you think would be perfectly suited to the admin panel. I’ve created a new section on the boards for this so if anyone has any ideas/thoughts about it please just drop in and give your thoughts.

I’m going to do a little bit of Manji work, and decide tomorrow whether to release it or not. Also Manji has been downloaded over 500 times since it went live 12 days ago. Again thanks to everyone for their interest and support.