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12th June, 2008
Here is a preview of the new design (essentially the same theme) based around Drupal as a core. I’m still mightily impressed with the capabilities of this CMS.
The design is pushing the boundaries of CSS a little bit and its also using transparent PNG backgrounds like before, but now the box sizes are flexible to accomodate a fluid width design!
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.
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.
12th May, 2008
I have decided to start redeveloping my own website’s design again, this time finishing the things I wanted from it in the beginning but couldn’t quite achieve the first time around, from the design through to the administration.
While visually the difference will be pretty unnoticeable (still black, dark purple, light green and golden-white), underneath there is all change again as I shift everything from separate templated pages to an entirely WordPress-driven site, hopefully allowing me to quickly and easily update things when time becomes a much more valuable commodity in the final year. Of course, this has required some serious customisation but should hopefully make the site much more robust.
And then finally I might get around to producing some nice flash content to fill in that dynamic header section at the top of the pages!
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.
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.
21st March, 2008
I was fixing my second year idat203 Negotiated Project (since moving it caused various hyperlinks to break, making viewing it in action pointless) when the flurry of discontented emails about the new i-dat website design started in the DAT forum (roughly around two hundred… million so far methinks).
So while testing my project I decided to see what it would make of the site, bearing in mind that the idea of this piece was to reveal what you aren’t meant to see in a website. This project will react to the quality of the underlying code in a site in the sense that it looks for individual words to fit into ever smaller spaces. Crap websites, ie. ones that haven’t been hand-coded but are rather churned out of some program like MS Word tend to clog up the project with huge chunks of code, which never get displayed. However humanly-readable, XHTML compliant sites, the sort that have had effort put into the coding side produce wonderful results like as can be seen in this example of the i-dat site:
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.
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