From January to April 2006, Garry and I spent an extensive amount of time investigating a variety of web solutions.

I set my linux o/s up for development and testing on apache2.

We covered a lot of products, mostly open source, many excellent solutions however kept finding one issue or another.

Issues that put adaptations of existing products out of scope.

After this we went with a simple php based product as an interim solution.

We were ready to deploy our site in October 2006 when we discovered it was rejected by one of our clients.

At that time I was underway developing this solution.

I chose C# for being OO, structured and fairly RAD - SQL Server for cost effective full stored procedure capability.

Absolutely nothing is done with 'pass-throughs', most of the business rules are applied by either relational structure or the procedures.

This means that most processing is close to the data, indexed, nice and fast.

The C# can be ported to linux, though I'm a little undecided on database - again, it has to be cost effective with full stored procedure capability.

Out of the products we'd reviewed, any that had good admin. capabilities tended to be over labour intensive.

With the admin sections of this site we've surpassed admin. productivity in many respects.

Achieving this has meant writing vasts amounts of javascript.

Javascript immediately presents many cross-browser issues.

This is further exacerbated by Microsoft designing Microsoft Tools for Microsoft Products.

I am not here to critisize that, just simply stating a fact.

Having done quiet a number of themes for Mozilla Firefox, I am quite concerned about achieving cross browser support.

Much of this is in place however there are things that have simply gone beyond time I have available.

Those issues will be attended to in due course.

The menubar gets delivered slightly different javascript for Firefox to IE.

The technique for the 'Move' anchor is to click down and only then drag it.

If it fails to move, release the button and it should follow the pointer around.

When finished moving it, just click again to release it - this will often work better when clicking on another object.

Similar applies to the slider, you'll either need to click On it or Near it and possibly release the button to get it to move.

Again, when finished scrolling to a previously hidden menu, click again to release the slider.

I've found this varies as to whether I'm using Firefox on Windows, Linux or Wine.

Choice of which javascript routines to use for each or both browsers has been based on optimal smoothness for stability.

Stability being determined by low overhead, light weight objects where possible, very least chance of leakage.

For example, each menu panel uses just one div then simple table structures - no use of 'butchered' bullet tags.

All up some runs smoother on Firefox and other smoother on IE.

Some menu panels (mostly grandchildren) will stick open at times - this will be fixed in a version to be released in the near future.

Regards,

Greg - aka glowplug

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