Category: Development

Categories
Development

Joomla! 1.5

JoomlaBeen messing around a bit recently with Joomla! as a CMS (content management system) solution.  I’ve very much impressed thus far, this is a great CMS solution.  Especially for medium to large sites.

The whole section, category, article form or organization took a little bit to adjust to.  But once you make sense of that, this really makes a lot of sense.  Plus the admin portion has a polish to it that you don’t see on many commercial CMS solutions, let a lone an open source one.  I think that most content managers would feel very comfortable working with articles to manage the content on a site.

Think I’m good with creating a custom template.  Now I’m going to have to try and create my own custom component or extension.

 

Categories
Development

Cow Licks Updates

Just wrapping up some site additions for Cow Licks Kids Salon.  

Slideshow

The client wanted a slideshow of images that they would be able to update and add images to.  So I created a pretty cool looking slideshow using Flash ActionScript 3.0.  It’s pretty cool.  It calls in the the images to be loaded through an xml file which the client can manipulate to alter the slideshow.  To reduce load time, each image is loaded a few seconds before it’s to appear on the stage.  

Parties Page

The client wanted to expand their offerings on their fast growing parties that they are offering.  Geoff came up with a slick design for the client which I was able to turn into a tabbed interface.  The tabs was built on YUI TabView.  YUI is a great library, and probably my favorite Javascript library out there now.  The site makes heavy use of YUI throughout.

Contact Form

Added a contact form to the site for users to contact the client.  It’s a pretty basic contact form written in PHP with some basic form validation thrown in there too.

WordPress CMS

Converted the existing static site over to WordPress to serve their CMS needs.  The client can now login to an admin app and make basic content changes on their own, without the need to FTP or pay someone else for basic site changes.

MooNews

Added a MooNews area on the homepage for the client to easily add latest news to their site via the newly installed CMS.

Categories
Development

Added Stuff to Work Page

Finally added some things I’ve worked on in the past the the work page of this site. Right now I broke things up into four categories:

  • websites
  • interactive projects
  • animations
  • videos
Dug up a lot of things I made years ago and forgot all about.  There’s some cool stuff scattered in there.  
Categories
Development

ACCCEA Site

Just updated the ACCCEA (Atlantic Cape Community College Education Association) website.  They were one of the first freelance sites I built.

The biggest upgrade to their site was moving their blog from the custom one I built for them a few years ago to being powered by WordPress.  As a result of the upgrades they now have a fully featured CMS (Content Management System).  So now they can just login and make edits to their website on their own.

Moving the blog over to WordPress also gives them a much more feature rich blogging engine then what they were currently using.  They can be a lot more creative when writing posts, adding images, video clips, styling the text, etc.

Categories
Development

Upgraded to WordPress 2.5

Just upgraded to WordPress version 2.5 yesterday.  My host Dreamhost has a super easy 1 click upgrade, so it only took a few minutes for the upgrade.  Just had to update the database and I was all set.  My custom theme didn’t break, nor does there seem to be anything else broken (cross my fingers) since the upgrade.

From the user end not too much will probably change as a result of this upgrade.  But the admin upgrades with 2.5 are very impressive.  The whole look and feel has been overhauled in a good way.  It took a few minutes for me to adjust to some of the changes, but so far so good.  

The upgraded RTE (Rich Test Editor) is great, works so much better with Safari.  The Add media functions are a great addition, including a YouTube video in a post just got a whole lot easier.  Overall I’m very impressed with the upgrade and will begin moving my clients over to 2.5.

Categories
Development

WordPress Custom Fields

Found the Custom Fields feature of WordPress to be very useful. I’m using them on the posts on this site that have ratings. It’s pretty cool. I’ve also used custom fields for one of my clients so that they can easily embed videos into their blogs.

Setting up a custom field is real easy. Within the WordPress admin near the bottom of a Write Post or Edit Post screen is an option for Custom Fields. You can select from existing field names the enter a value for that custom field or you can type a new custom field name into the key field to create a new custom field. So, creating custom fields is pretty easy, but how do you now present that info?

WordPress offers a get_post_meta() function to work with the custom fields. Below is an example in PHP of using the get_post_meta() to display the contents of a custom field named video.

echo get_post_meta($post->ID, "video", true);

Three parameters are being passed to get_post_meta. The first is the ID of the current post, then the name of the custom field, and last is if you want to return a single string or an array.