Tag Archives: design

New Theme for this site

I redid the theme for the site, and moved it to 2.6.1. I am not going to even remotely claim that this is a visually pleasing site, nor will I ever claim it will win for the best site design. However, what made me change it was that I was not exactly enamored by any of the themes, and decided to do one myself. I looked for how to do this, as I have messed around with Photoshop before, and have become brilliant at hacking things around in Photoshop. But I took a few tutorials on how to do some stuff. This design is based from those tutorials. For those who would like to know, I went to these sites:

That was just some of them. I may do more, but I am also teaching myself Objective-C/Cocoafor the Apple/iPod/iPhone. But if there are any good links out there for Apple tutorials, let me know, because I may just be Googling the wrong phrases.

Blogs, Forums and CakePHP

In one of my contracts, I am writing a full application with membership, conference signups, information pages, and a small little forum. This is all per the customer’s request. The solution I decided on, was CakePHP for the framework. It is not going to be a big, full site like a MySpace, or Facebook. It is a small local non-profit group who will be able to have its membership keep in touch via the site. So the main pages are not hard. Most of the pages will follow a simplistic CRUD (create, read, update and delete) format, with the site admins being able to create, update and delete most pages. But instead of having a static site, they wanted the membership to be able to interact with the authors of the pages, and themselves.

The pages are not hard to enable this. I could have just as easily installed a WordPress instance for the solution, themed it up, and be done. Which I was seriously considering, as this already has the permissions, updates, management, etc. However, they were not too happy with something like this. So I looked elsewhere. Drupal would provide a good out of the box solution, but there were problems with the modules, and it seemed to take too much overhead to get the groups, permissions and other CMS features set up for this small site. The next idea I looked at was going the CakePHP route. Continue reading Blogs, Forums and CakePHP