LISSARD / News: Recent posts

LISSARD stands for "LISSARD Integrates School Systems' Administrative Reporting Data" and aims to be a complete school administrative package. It is written in PHP and is highly modular in both design and implementation. As such, it includes several pluggable subsystems, including but not limited to authentication, database access, and output processing. At this point in its life, LISSARD is most useful as a web-based application framework, and at that it excels.... read more

The new module system has been completed, and the new navigation system is working but will require some mild amount of tweaking. Furthermore, a new object-oriented output layer -- with support for output of literally any form (whether it be HTML, XHTML, WML, PDF, or other) -- is about halfway done. LISSARD is on track for an initial release of the framework in the coming weeks.

At this point, LISSARD is fairly large (15,000 lines of PHP) and reaching the upper bound of its framework. This was expected since the beginning of the core functions (which were originally written in two hours), and a rewrite of large amounts of 'glue' functionality would at some point be necessary.

After some amounts of contemplating the issues, an attack plan has been drafted. It includes a new plugin interface including a dependency system, a re-built navigation system, a re-built permission system, and of course some mild re-working of most of the core functions. During this time, module work will grind to a halt (because of the new API), and incremental upgrades via CVS are not recommended. Production systems should avoid the new code until LISSARD 0.1, which will be the first release and will include the new framework.... read more