Proposed Changes for Version 6

Updates:

2024 September

• Now that all functions of the pre-2024 website have been restored in Version 5.0, and new features are now being added to that version, the need for a rewrite is less pressing. Planning for Version 6 is on hold.

2024 July

• With Board approval, planning begins for the prospectus outlined below.
• Outline of coding task: using the simplest framework possible, create these three pages (each representing one type of data output), which I can learn to adapt for other functions:
  1. Index listing: bahai-library.com/Music
  2. Single-record output: bahai-library.com/uhj_reflections_first_century
  3. Metadata query: bahai-library.com/tags/God
• Upcoming: I will next make a list of the functions that are behind each of those three; our developer can look at the above HTML output, look at my list of functions, and create his/her own code from scratch with no need to refer to mine.

Background:

Planning for Version 5 of this website begin in 2013, the year after it was fully recoded as 4.0. After a 3-year winding redevelopment, which culminated in a failed attempt to migrate to the cloud, in April it was hastily moved to a new server and recoded (the old server was end-of-lease and the PHP was past end-of-life).

With this clean-slate fresh-start, and given that some of the initial planning for this version is now 12 years out-of-date, previous to-do lists and design plans are off the table.

The code written in April-June for Version 5 was intended to be interim-only and discarded as soon as a professional could re-work it. But as we continue to develop it, restoring old features and adding new ones, it becomes a more mature replacement on its own, and a full-scale redevelopment as originally planned is less urgent.

I will continue refining and expanding the "5.0 beta" code through August, at which point it will be ready to transition to bahai-library.com, replacing the April 30 archive. By September 2024 I will have replaced all functions from the last iteration of Version 4.6.

With 5 dev mature enough to replace the production site, we will then hire a programmer to review and recreate my own code, but with professional syntax. This will become Version 6, and probably late 2025 or 2026.

We will contract for a specific, defined job that I and the Board can oversee. This will avoid the kind of large and complex codeset that was being developed for AWS in 2023, and will avoid paying a developer the $8,000-$10,000 it would take to implement and customize a set of existing frameworks. With 20 hours of work a developer can create the basic functions I need, which I can then copy and expand on myself at my leisure. My recent ground-up rewrite convinces me that a small-and-lightweight codeset is doable.

If there should be interest in creating a feature-rich framework-driven or cloud-based version of the Library, this would be Version 7 and could be developed at leisure and in parallel.