I have been racking my brain for the past couple days trying to get CakePHP to do exactly what I want for user registration and login until I finally found a great post http://www.jbcrawford.net/archives/45. Big thank you to JB Crawford for posting that.  Now I can move forward with the new Thintopia site.  It will be well worth the struggle. Along the way I became very familiar with all the ins and outs with this framework.  Things should start rolling right along.  Too bad I am about a week behind my hoped schedule.  I wanted to release something by tomorrow but that will not be the case and it make take several weeks but when the new site is ready it will be a glorious day.

Circumstances have led me work on thintopia once again.  The site has been growing in popularity.  Today alone there have been over half a dozen new weight loss competitions created.  By far, the biggest request people have had is for the ability to edit existing competitions.  I also notice that many people create competitions and never participate.  The site has over 700 users but we only get about 20 visits per day. I have my suspicions why people aren’t using the site after joining.  My main concern is that the site is difficult to use or understand.  I want to change that and make the site more user friendly.

My goal for the next week or two is to change the backbone of thintopia which will allow for more features and improve the current features.  I have been learning to program with CakePHP framework.  It appears to be very powerful and I am just slowly learning how to work with it and rebuild thintopia using this tool.

If you are new to thintopia, welcome!  There are so many of us that want to lose weight and motivate each other through friendly competition.  I am open to suggestions and feedback.  This is your site so make the most of it.

Thintopia.com is growing steadily without me doing a single thing.  People keep telling friends and family and creating new competitions.  I’m getting more and more motivated to get the new version of the site done.  Yesterday I was up until 2am getting the new user home page going.  The next step is to get the competition home page up, then the competition list, competition create, then profiles, friends, user comments, groups.  The list goes on and on.

Tonight I added an about page and I’m targeting it more about weight loss competitions. I’ve also started the fitness tracker page.  Another fun thing is the thintopia store.  You can purchase shirts or a mug with the thintopia logo!  I want to spend a little more time with designing some different shirts that people will want to buy.

I was working on the ability to upload photos which I finished but I was having trouble resizing the images to 3 different sizes.  I want to be able to have a thumbnail, small and large version.  Once this is done I will be able to use the code to allow for competition images and group images.  It has been a few weeks since I’ve had time and been motivated to work on this again.  It seems that whenever I don’t have time I’m motivated but when I have time I’m not motivated.  I need to just push through and get the site to a point where I can switch from the current version.  The new site will be much more user friendly and functional.

Also.  I’ve created an account on Zazzle where I will be able to sell shirts, mugs, etc with the Thintopia logo.  I also plan to put a link for paypal donations.  The other way I plan to help cover the cost of hosting is through google ads but I will need much more traffic before that will be worth adding.  We’ll keep the look and feel clean…for now.

Last night I created the account settings page and added the ability to change password, username and email. I also have the password reset for people who forget their password. I decided to make sure and get all the necessary user tools in place first because when I first made thintopia I left these for later and was not super motivated to do them after the fact and ended up resetting people’s passwords manually. The first thintopia was a good learning experience and my hope is that the new thintopia will be much much better and more professional and that I will be able to market it. I never felt I could market the first one because it lacked a lot of the little things that make a professional website and had it gotten very popular I would have spent a lot of time helping people and fixing the site.

Next step: User profiles. I need to decide what to put in the profile. I know I want a picture as well as some fitness related questions. I want people to be able to leave comments. Any ideas for user profiles?

I’m working on the new registration process as well as account/profile information.  I want to require as little information as possible to increase the chances that visitors will register.  I always like quick and easy registration.  Some extra information is nice for customizing the user experience but ultimately the idea is to attract people to join then allow them to add more information later to improve their experience.  I’ve decided to only require a username, email address and a password.  Other information that can be added later include gender, location (country, zip code), and other profile details (photo, interests, goals, marital status, etc).

Thintopia ver2.0 is currently in the works.  It will look better, work better and include more features.  I plan to add user profiles, friends, groups, and an advanced fitness tracker.  The competitions will also be easier to manage and use.  I will post here on my progress.  At some point I will even post a link for those interested in using the new site before anyone else.