May 31st, 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.
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April 16th, 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.
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March 29th, 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 until after following the installation instructions most diligently 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.
March 15th, 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.
February 20th, 2008
I am currently working on the Ocean Addict website now alongside several other projects, for which we have decided to use Wordpress as a form of CMS and integrate it with other features such as e-commerce software, a gallery and a forum.
Here is a preview of my current direction of design…
The flash actionscript behind this is flexible enough to allow for any size
puzzle to be created and jumbled as many times as I like. In addition to this,
the difficulty of rotating pieces is also a feature.