A couple of days ago I deliberately deleted all the code for my CMS, Cinnabar. And this morning I resurrected it all, restoring all files from SVN. So why did delete it, and why did I bring it back?
In the first few days of the project, I knew at the back of my mind I was going to have to deal with a tricky database setup involving a many-to-many join table with additional properties. I wasn't sure how I was going to get it to work in Grails, so after I had built the basic scaffold of the site, I concentrated on that setup. It took a while, and there is some ugly database access code I need to revisit. Once I had that working, and had done some UI work, I needed to go back and deal with the part I had missed.
The basic structure of a Cinnabar project will be: a Site is comprised of a number of Page Templates. A Page Template will have zero or more Input Components (think text boxes, pictures, etc). A Page Template will also have zero or more Section Templates, and those Section Templates will themselves comprise many Input Components. The data model for these Input Components (I must come up with a better name for these...) is the tricky thing with the join tables, so I skipped the Section Templates part of the project.
When I started to add in the Section Templates, I realised that I had missed some key thinking and I couldn't just engineer in the Section Templates. Since then I've done a lot more thinking, and I eventually decided the whole project was built on shaky grounds. Trying to unpick my broken Section Templates from the rest of the project looked like pretty tricky stuff, so I branched the code in SVN, and pressed delete.
Now I'm not so sure - delete and start again is a pretty dramatic approach. And I got scared and reverted the changes. So now I need to methodically work through the code base, and work out what should stay and what should go. It might be a fraught weekend...