Firefly Development
It’s been in development off and on, when I’ve had time, for over a year now. COVID really impacted my app development plans. This September, I will be dedicating time to push out the release on Code Canyon and updating Coral to version 2. I am currently working on integrating it into my own website for clients to make sure it has a feature set that customers deserve. It is a replacement for two legacy products: Entity and Serenity, that both stagnated and went away from the creative vision I originally had for those products. Firefly is a completely new venture.
Early Dashboard Screenshot
Unlike Entity and Serenity, Firefly is built on a light, but feature-rich framework: CodeIgniter 4. It has been an awesome experience developing on top of this framework. So much so, that I have made a commitment to move all my development over to it. Believe it or not, CodeIgniter 4 is lighter than Slim 4, with the required dependencies it needs to be useful. Features I expect to have in the release version include:
- Invoicing and payments with Manual, Stripe, and Paypal options
- Calendar and integrated appointment system for consults and user-defined time slots
- Integrated user-defined forms for quotes, feedback, and more
- Product sales with an emphasis on digital deliverables and user-defined licensing model
- Everything is configured using the web interface no more editing config files!
- Project management tools that “make sense” and are easy and flexible
- Multi-User environment with messaging and user-defined roles and permissions
- Auto updating and patching using a fair annual support subscription (1st year is free)
… and so much more. This little project is really starting to shine and I am excited to get it out the door to customers.
Coral Development
As said above, Coral too has migrated to a CodeIgniter 4 base. So, all the config file free benefits in Firefly are being integrated into the next release of Coral. The interface got a redesign, but it’s not quite ready for a screenshot reveal yet. I moved to a common interface, as shown above, for all my applications to speed up development time. This design system and associated libraries are tightly integrated into CodeIgniter. That’s one of the main reasons I forked it and plan on continuing work on the framework code named: Ivory. Once I get it to a usable state, I will be uploading the entire package to Github.
Other apps in the works
I have been working off and on, on a Directus-like application focused on creating user-defined APIs that can be capitalized on by the operator. APIs are in demand, and depending on the data you’re serving, access to that data can be quite valuable. This application, code named: Nimble, will make it easy to create data sets and digital deliverables while simultaneously managing access to those assets via rate limiting and other user-defined limits. Everything is configured using the web interface. It’s still really early in the development, but it will be on the table following Coral’s update.
Open source
After I release the next three applications, I’m going to take a break from Code Canyon work to start on some open source ventures. Namely, PHP web integrations for Linux systems a la CPanel. The dashboards will be served using PHP, but the back end is powered by Go. I always run into the same issues when working with a clean slate system. Setting up services and configurations can get tedious if you don’t know where to look or know the particular syntax the configuration uses (I’m looking at you Postfix and Dovecot…). I hope to solve some of those problems with this project. The effort will be completely opensource and updated as needed.
Here’s hoping to an awesome year!
