HirdWeb » design http://www.hirdweb.com Another Blog clogging up the already crowded internet Wed, 18 Jan 2012 20:54:49 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3 New Theme for this site http://www.hirdweb.com/2008/08/16/new-theme-for-this-site/ http://www.hirdweb.com/2008/08/16/new-theme-for-this-site/#comments Sun, 17 Aug 2008 02:56:26 +0000 stephen http://www.hirdweb.com/?p=33 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.

]]> http://www.hirdweb.com/2008/08/16/new-theme-for-this-site/feed/ 0 Blogs, Forums and CakePHP http://www.hirdweb.com/2008/07/29/blogs-forums-and-cakephp/ http://www.hirdweb.com/2008/07/29/blogs-forums-and-cakephp/#comments Tue, 29 Jul 2008 15:01:14 +0000 stephen http://www.hirdweb.com/?p=9 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.

The pages were easy to set up. Permissions were not too much, as they really did not need a full blown ACL/Auth module (which I wrote about earlier). Comments on pages were few, and the real design portion came to the “forum” area. They did not want a full forum, they basically wanted topics they could post to, and have the members and “others” reply to those topics. This was more of a hybrid blog/forum. The key was creating the right tables in the database.

Right now I have 2 tables, one for forums, and one for posts. Each topic is contained in the Posts table, and has an “on/off” switch to delimit it as a topic in the forum. All posts for that topic have the topic id as their “parent”. I thought of creating 3 tables, (Forums, Topics, Posts), and for a high traffic site, I may have done that as well. For right now, the two tables are good. As I get further along on this track, I will post some of the methods I used to create this concept.

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