The New mungenetbar

The New mungnetbar

Using Visual Basic and Simon Fell’s pocketSOAP, I created a small interface that communicates between my desktop and the server. There is a special SOAP interface to the database that permits remote updating of the mungenetengine without using the traditional web-based interface.

This is the mungenetbar. It sits at the bottom of my laptop’s screen and tells me:

• the number of page views on the site
• the number of unique users to have visited the site
• the current ADBE share price

If I double-click on the mungenetbar, I can see either select the content or images within a particular section of the site.

The edit window for a content or image allows me to update the “metadata” etc for a piece of content. If I “persist” the data, this downloads the HTML, images, CSS into a folder that permits editing in GoLive 6.0

When looking at images in a section, I can download the image to the desktop, and automatically open Photoshop 7.

The +blog button is a quick weblog addition/edit button. Weblogs on the front page of the site are updated more often – so this input permits quick editing. The Check Site button asks Internet Explorer to go to my home page URL and display a recent addition to the ‘blog.

There is another way of adding elements to the site. By dragging a HTML, JPEG, GIF or PDF to the mungenetbar, it will display the content dialog box permitting quick insertion of content. If the image or HTML fragment contains metadata, the mungenetbar recognises this and changes the data on the site.

On the server-side, I am using nusoap PHP Libraries as my server connector. After working though WSDL — which is a little of a mind-bender, the VB client the PHP server works well. Even with complex types! I can highly recommend both pocketSOAP and NuSOAP.

The next step is to recreate the legacy VB code in C-sharp. This will be primarily a learning process.