WhatIWantMost Performing a little cleanup

Because of personal and family bouts with the flu I have not done anything new this week on the WhatIWantMost project. I hope to correct that this weekend. In the meantime I have some leftovers from last week that I have not had a chance to talk about yet. Late last week I spent a few evenings doing some clean-up work.

Growing weary of the amateurish looking homebuilt CSS layout I went looking for something a little more solid. I ended up using one of Dynamic Drive’s CSS layouts to fix the liquid 2-column format that I had tried to do myself. The layout itself looks much better now, though I know the colors are still a little blah. I also implemented one of Dynamic Drive’s horizontal tab menus. I don’t know if I am going to keep it or not, but it works for now.

You may notice that the right sidebar content is a little tighter. The primary reason is that I went back into those controls and swapped out the datalist I used to prototype the controls with the much lighter weight repeater control. Things are starting to feel a little better - I’m starting to knock out some of the “I’ll get around to that later” stuff.

One of the other items from that list that was recently completed was the implementation of a UrlProvider class. The UrlProvider is a way of taking all the details about building links to pages and external resources (like Amazon Product pages) and locking it away in one class. So rather than having the details of creating a link to an Amazon product duplicated in 10 different pages in my site I can simply do something like this:
BuyItAtAmazon.NavigateUrl = UrlProvider.GetAmazonItemUrl(product.AmazonID);

I was able to split out the Add/Edit an Item functionality from the main wishlist page easily enough. I had described deciding to do this move in my last WIWM post. This opened the way for adding some additional functionality to the “add an item” form. Now the user can enter just the AmazonID and the rest of the form will be automatically filled with the correct data from Amazon. Or the user can enter the product’s name only in the form, perform a search on Amazon/Yahoo/Ebay, and the rest of the form data can be filled with the selected item’s data.

That’s the status of the project as it stands today. Hopefully I can spend some quality time adding some functionality this weekend and I can cross some more items off my TODO list.