Over the last few months, the Childzilla Team has been working hard to finish a lot of the core components of the site. Just recently, we rolled out a totally revamped Chore Chart editor which was a huge improvement over the old Chore Chart manager. Behind the scenes, we also did a very significant overhaul to the Membership and Authentication system to accomodate for the various Childzilla Community components that we rolled out this week.
Even though we have made some very significant accomplishements with the service in the last few months, we still have a *ton* planned! Here is a quick break-down of our short-term development goals:
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Printable Chore Charts: While we originally developed Childzilla so that kids can check off their chores every day, we've found that a lot of parents would prefer a printed chart that can be entered into the system less frequently. Based on this feedback, we will be developing components to allow parents and kids to print off their week of chores which kids can check off and enter in the system at the end of the week, or whenever they wish. The printed chart will be styled based on the child's selected theme. So, if they have the "Skateboard Kid" theme activated, their chore chart will be styled according to this theme.
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Blogging/Journaling for kids: We already have a very very simplistic daily journal active for kids to leave "Day Notes" for each day, but we are going to implement a much more robust blogging engine for kids to use, and parents to monitor. Parents will be able to monitor and limit this feature.
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Message Board: Kids will be able to have their own Message Board, for friends/family to post messages to. Again, we will take our time on this feature to ensure parents have 100% control over content being posted on their children's Message Board.
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Prize Support: While we already have virtually millions of prizes available for you to search for, we want to integrate with a few more sources to give you even more options. We also intend on tweaking the Custom Prize pages to further enhance the functionality.
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More Games: While we have a pretty good selection of games available, we are going to work on getting even more games. We will also strive to provide games for a wider range of age groups.
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More Themes: We have about 100 unique themes that kids can choose for their site. We will continue to develop themes that we develop, but we will also develop a theme editor to allow people to develop their own themes. We will likely develop the editor in two flavors, one for people who want to change colors or images, and another for advanced users who are comfortable in working with HTML and CSS files directly.
We will tackle each of the above feature goals one by one until the list is complete. Of course we will continue to make small changes/fixes, but as far as major feature additions, the above list is our priority.
If you feel there is something missing from the list, please post your suggestions to our Feature Request forum!