Ok, so we’ve briefly discussed the importance of figuring out what your software should do, so what will my software do? What I need to do is sit down and write out what the software will do, and review that from an experienced developer stand point and figure out where I’ve not been precise enough. Let’s start with this (based on what MultiBlog the desktop app can do):

MultiBlog will allow users to register an account. Within that account they will be able to configure multiple remote blog accounts. They will then be able to write blog entries and cross post this to multiple blogs within multiple blog accounts.

That’s great. But that’s very high level, clearly that needs some expansion. What details are needed to register an account? What makes up a remote blog account? How do they write entries? How do they cross post the entry? It will serve as a statement of intent, but it’s light years away from a specification. I’m going to take one aspect of this and expand it as a worked example, that will be the writing of entries.

MultiBlog will allow a logged in user to write blog entries within a browser-based WYSIWG editor with the option to edit the raw mark-up of the entry. The software will support drafting of entries.

An initial screen will list all current, unposted draft entries the user has been composing. The user will be able to select a draft to continue editing, or to create a new draft. Upon selecting one of these options, the user will be presented with an editor screen.

The editor screen will contain controls to capture:

• Post title
• Post body
• Post tags
• Current Mood
• Current Music
• Post date and time

The editor will autosave drafts every 5 minutes, and allow for manual saving of drafts.

In addition, in a future release, the editor screen will integrate to external web services to insert content, for example, product information for Amazon content or Flickr images. This will allow easy blogging about films, books and photos taken etc. However, this will not be implemented for MultiBlog Online 1.0.

This is better. There is much more detail. However, there are still blank areas, what exactly will the WYSIWG editor do? What are it’s features? This is something I won’t expand as I’m just going to go with one of the leading open source, browser based WYSIWYG editors for HTML, after evaluating them against the other requirements in this area. One of these is of particular interest for several reasons. The final paragraph of my requirements for the Blog Entry Editor is a future requirement to allow easy insertion of data from Amazon, Flickr or other web services. Whatever editor I pick up is going to have to be easy to extend/adapt so I can use widgets to pull that information across.

This is an isolated packet of requirements. How does this interact with the rest of MultiBlog? What else will the rest of the application do? Obviously, I need a full MultiBlog requirements specification. I don’t intend to post that as a Blog entry. I will produce a document, which I will publish, that covers and elaborates everything I intend the application to do.

That will then form the basis of my high-level software design and architecture.

Popularity: 32% [?]

This is version 1 of this entry and was posted 1 year, 6 months ago on Friday, May 25th, 2007 at 11:55 am and is filed under MultiBlog. It's popularity ranking is Popularity: 32% [?]. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. This is the first version of this post.