Month: June 2016

Update #2 – A few changes made

Posted on by Mike

I’ve been hard at work trying to bring you FitMonstr to you as soon as possible. During our revamp, I have made a few changes to FitMonstr to bring a more pleasant experience.

First off, I have removed the food section. If you didn’t know already, this section basically was a database of normal foods such as nuts, fruits and so forth… but I felt that this area wasn’t really a priority and could be expanded on at a later date. Because of this, I have decided that it was best for the food section to be temporarily removed because I would rather provide features that have been worked on with full dedication rather than something that has been made with minimal effort.

Secondly, the websites region can be changed by editing the websites URL. No longer do you have to manually select the region if you wish to browse it, now you can just simply add the region code at the beginning of the domain and it will automatically navigate to its region. (eg http://uk.fitmonstr.com). The current regions supported so far is UK and US.

Users cannot now submit exercises and supplements until I feel that FitMonstr has evolved to the point where it is essentially “self-sustaining”. Because so much data needs to be added before/during the launch, I believe its best that I disable users from submitting their own data until the database is at a relatively stable state. This is because it will be too much work to moderate each individual submission at the beginning. However, users can still edit current information on the data.

I am working hard to bring you FitMonstr during the late stages of July/early August. Stay tuned by following our twitter! @TheFitMonstr

 

Recap of first revamp

Posted on by Mike

So the revamp of FitMonstr had started a couple days ago and some solid progress has been made. If you haven’t read the previous post, basically what is happening is that we are going through the entire system and updating it with new programming concepts and techniques. The reason that we are doing this is because, ultimately, this leads to not only a more dynamic and secure system, but it also makes the back end code much more readable. This, in turn, allows us to make changes to the system more efficiently and without the risk of breaking anything.

So first off, we had to change the very foundations of the system. FitMonstr used to use MySQL_Connect to connect to the database, but if you know anything about PHP, you will also know that MYSQL_Connect is deprecated. This means it is no longer supported as there are new, more secure and efficient methods to connect to the database such as PDO (PHP Data Objects) and MySQLi. PDO is what we are going to be replacing everything with. Not only does PDO implement the use of objects to connect to the database, it also allows for the use of prepared statements which helps against SQL Injection attacks. Pretty much every single query that is used on the system will have to be replaced with its PDO counterpart.

Once we had changed the foundations, we had to revamp the user system. This includes the login and register. The user system  used to work by creating users in a procedural method. This means that the system went down the code and just completed everything in turn. Now we have implemented a user class into the mix so now users can be created as objects on the fly without having to do much at all. This is especially useful but we can also use this object on other areas of the website if need be (e.g creating a user via the admin area). This also allows us to change the users settings without needing to change it’s associated pages.

For the first stage of the revamp, we have made some pretty good progress transitioning the system to more efficient and stable methods but we still have a long way to go.