Even if we try to account for all aspects in the design phase, I know there will be situations where decisions made early on will have negative effects later down the road. I will document everything as it happens, because I find that I learn more from mistakes, and hopefully you will to.

I will mainly be working on this project solo, which means I will not only be dealing with PHP and MySQL, but also HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc. Since I believe many developers work alone I hope that this will interest most readers.

I personally like to start a project with a name, simply because it gives the project an identity, but… In this case I cannot decide on an appropriate name so I am going to skip this step for the moment and move onto some actual code design, one of the most important and exciting steps.

First let’s set down some general guidelines:

• Version Control: Subversion (SVN)
• PHP Version: The project will be written in PHP5 and will not support PHP4. Let’s face it PHP4 is dead and if your server is still running 4 you NEED to upgrade.
• MySQL Version: I will be using MySQL 5, again if your not on 5, what are you waiting for?
• HTTP Server Platform: Apache
• Browser Support: Firefox, Internet Explorer, AOL Browser, Netscape, Opera, Safari. This is just a list off the top of my head, basically we are going to attempt to support as many browsers as possible.

Again these are just general guidelines; eventually the project will be able to support multiple database servers, different HTTP server platforms, etc. Initially these are our targets for support; no reason to bog the development process down with attempting to support everything under the sun, but… Since we want the project to be as flexible as possible, we will need to account for this NOW in our framework design.

OK, now that we have our guidelines; the next step will be to start coding right? Wrong, next we will decide on a directory structure, and create the SVN repository to hold our project.

I hope you are as excited as I am to get this thing underway, please check back soon.