Ning Aggregator
Most of my work on Ning thus far has been in editing other apps, a large portion of it in testing and QA work. Since the launch, I’ve been taking a couple days “off” — still playing with ning, but at my own pace rather than at a “Almost time to release” pace.
Today, I built my first complete and clonable app from scratch.
Planet Ning is a planet style aggregation tool, supporting RSS 2.0 fields and the ability to rate any RSS item. This app took a total of about 1.5 hours to put together, a large part of that simply playing with design to get it to look semi decent. It uses the RSS alpha component for RSS parsing, XNC_HTML for the page bottom navigation, XNC_Rating for ratings, and the “bot” option to load new posts.
Pretty cool little app. One spot of trouble I ran into: XNC_Rating is designed to have only one form field per page. I overrode just one function to fix it though, testament to the flexibility of the code behind some of the XNC components. This is also a testament to Object Oriented code, and PHP 5 in general: in PHP4, I’m sure this would have been much harder, but PHP5’s exceptional class support, along with exception handling, make it so much more fun to work with than PHP4 was for me.
You can feel free to clone the app and play with it: it’s not ‘complete’ by any means, but it definitely works.