Proposed Changes for Version 6

Updates:

2025 January

• Version 5.1 is now mostly complete and finally has all the features/functions we've long been needing. Future plans are coming into focus, and I amend the comments below:
• I am no longer wedded to the idea of a LAMP stack for 6; as I would not be involved in the coding myself, the language would be up to the developer, and I can learn anew.
• I now think we might need a Project Manager, someone dedicated, competent, and reliable, and deepened in the Baha'i Faith, and likely a separate Developer, who need not know anything about the Faith. I imagine the Manager position would be partially compensated, to warrant their time spent, but also working partly for-the-love-of-the-Faith; the Developer position would be fully compensated.

2024 September

• Now that most of the functions of the pre-2024 website have been restored in Version 5, and new features are already being added to that version, the need for a rewrite is less pressing. Planning for Version 6 is on hold until 2025.

2024 July

• With Board approval, planning begins for the prospectus outlined below.
• We will hire a PHP dev to create, using the simplest LAMP framework, a fully-functioning website for desktop and mobile that generates the following frontend interfaces (each representing one type of data output) and the necessary backend functions, which the developer and/or I can adapt for other functions:
  1. Collection listing: bahai-library.com/Music
  2. Single-record output: bahai-library.com/uhj_reflections_first_century
  3. Tags page: bahai-library.com/tags/Horace_Holley
  4. Author page: bahai-library.com/author/Horace_Holley
  5. Chronology: bahai-library.com/chronology/184- to bahai-library.com/chronology/1848-03-30
  6. Search: Title, Author, Date

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 March 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With this clean-slate fresh-start, and given that some of the initial planning for this version is now 12 years out-of-date, previous to-do lists and design plans are off the table.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, possibly 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 $15,000-20,000 it would take to implement and customize a set of third-party frameworks. With 100+ hours of work a developer can create all the basic functions, 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.

[Update, Nov. 2024: 5.0 complete was in place by August. I'm now going through bug fixes, which is properly 5.09, and planning the upgrades for 5.1.]