Experimenting With Drupal

31st May, 2008

I have felt a little bit discontented with the way the Ocean Addict site has been going from an architectural point-of-view, particularly since adding the shop which is using the ancient system of OSCommerce and its flakey table-based layout and template system. The Ocean Addict site was always going to be an online store but initially started off as a related news and information blog with the view to expanding it. However my choice of using a blog as the core of the site (even one as expandable as WordPress), and knowing very little about what open source CMS‘s have to offer, is looking more and more limiting.

Read the rest of this entry »

e-Commerce Buttons

23rd May, 2008

Here are some new buttons to replace the horrific GIF images that came with the clean install of oscommerce on Ocean Addict. In order, they are Accounts, Shopping Cart and Checkout.

Read the rest of this entry »

Flash, Twitter and crossdomain.xml

22nd April, 2008

As part of the latest FRED website update, I’ve been asked to include a twitter feed integrated into the flash file itself. Not knowing much about twitter itself apart from the basics, like knowing I’d have to take data from a feed and have to make some actionscript that parses the XML, I started the necessary research to see what people had done before me.

It is fortunate then, that I stumbled across this post, Twitter Issues, which describes a scenario that is not unfamiliar to me. It also provides a solution which will ultimately save me time later on! Basically, since some major security updates in Flash quite a long while ago, it hasn’t been able to access data on any server different to the one it is hosted on without express permission from the other server in the form of a special file called crossdomain.xml. I had the same issue when developing the original FRED Roles database stored on one site and accessed via flash from the other. Now Twitter themselves could have solved the issue by simply using a * (star) in their file to allow access from anyone, but for whatever reason they chose not to.

Looping Smarties Pattern

16th April, 2008

Yesterday I was given the interesting task of creating a looping pattern of smarties to be printed off in giant scale and wrapped around the outside of a van. After buying several smarties and taking a few photographs later, I produced this pattern:

Separating Posts from Pages in WordPress

16th April, 2008

I decided that what our wordpress-cross-CMS for Ocean Addict required was the ability to browse through the thousands of expected Pages (pages because of the fact they exist outside of the post timeline as a form of static content) forming the school listings via the inbuilt category system. This was easily achievable by creating a page template specifically for displaying a school listing with the Comments and Categories shown and by using the useful plugin Page Category Plus for replicating the Category selection interface in the admin (I was already aware that this was possible since Pages are simply Posts that are treated differently but still have all the same mySQL fields).

While this side of things worked exactly as expected it threw up a unique issue I hadn’t considered.

Read the rest of this entry »

Snugglebums Teddy Bear Logo Idea

7th April, 2008

Update: Finished design here!

So here is the latest logo design project working for Neovirtua for my placement year, to create a graphic for the new Snugglebums Website we shall be working on in the near future.

Read the rest of this entry »

WordPress and SMF Integration

29th March, 2008

As we continue to develop the Ocean Addict website it was decided that the forum needed to be as robust and powerful as possible so this meant installing additional forum software, in the form of a Simple Machines Forum. Once this was done, clearly there needed to be as much integration for users as possible, from logging in to styling the user interface, so I set about searching for a method of bridging WordPress and SMF.

I quickly found http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-smf-a-simplemachines-bridge/, which seemed ideal. That is until after diligently following the installation instructions the plugin caused the entire site to break. Fortunately WordPress’s plugin system can be rescued by simply deleting the offending plugin.

Searching for much longer wielded a solution based on the first. The stuff that can be found at http://www.earthorbit.com/opensource/ DOES work and works well.

Content Management Systems Research

15th March, 2008

For the Ocean Addict website I have been looking into open source solutions to creating a form of CMS to link together the main features now wanted for the site. An obvious choice might be something like Joomla! or Drupal but we have already got together the blog frontpage and a store, so instead the site is heading for WordPress. I’ve heard of WP being used before as a CMS, it is known for its flexibility but until now I have never considered using it as anything more as a blog.

An excellent page bringing together a whole range of resources to do just this can be found at:

http://www.graphicdesignblog.co.uk/wordpress-as-a-cms-content-management-system/

Before now I have experimented with the nextgen gallery wordpress system and the wordpress simple forum.