Brian's Web Design & Development

11/15/09 - Community Cart

I've now released my second contribution to the CodeIgniter community. This one is an e-commerce application called Community Cart.

In the past I used open source applications for e-commerce websites, but the problem was that I'd have to spend hours or even days learning how they work, stripping out features I didn't need, and adding ones that I did. I was really sick of doing this, and needed my own application so that I can work more efficiently.

Community Cart is built on top of a modified version of my Community Auth user management and authentication application. There are two shipping libraries, and one payment gateway library included. Community Cart also computes tax for sales to residents in a state or states that are designated as taxable.

Take a look at Community Cart: http://codeigniter.com/wiki/Community_Cart/

9/4/09 - www.WorkingSoulfully.com

Yes, another Wordpress project. This website had already been designed and developed, but the owner wanted the site to have a blog. Having made custom Wordpress themes before, I knew just how to go about transforming the site. I did have one little problem, but I managed to solve it. Apparently, Wordpress does not allow $_POST arrays to be used on pages, or even inside the page template. After trying to work through this a couple of different ways, the solution ended up being to change the action of the forms to a script located outside of Wordpress, and then redirect the user back into Wordpress after processing. Sometimes Wordpress can be so simple to use, and other times... I'm losing sleep!

I gotta say, the site owner was a delight to work with, and I wish I had more customers that were like her. Thanks Judy!

8/23/09 - Community Auth

Finally! It's taken quite a bit of time, working on this project in my spare time, but I have a fully functional contribution for the CodeIgniter Community.

Community Auth, a free and open source user management and user authentication application, aiming to make the work of creating websites that need private areas faster to develop than ever before. Together, with the famous framework it rides on, Community Auth strives to be easy to use, yet secure, fast, and modular.

Community Auth will still need to be configured to your specific needs, unless your needs are very simple, but with the core out of the way, you can be on your way to programming the unique functionality of your clients website, rather than waste time reinventing the wheel.

If your not a programmer, what this means is that I have a way to save you money. Since the core of the authentication application is modular, I can plug it in and configure it to your needs with minimal effort.

Take a look at Community Auth today: http://codeigniter.com/wiki/Community_Auth/

7/31/09 - Busy with Wordpress

Duty calls, and I have been really busy lately. I've had an unusual amount of people needing wordpress help or sites done, and although this isn't the best use of my development skills, I'm certainly not going to turn them away.

I've actually come to enjoy Wordpress quite a bit. With basically no coding skills at all, a person can have a Wordpress blog or website, and do amazing things. This doesn't mean that it will be the same quality as a custom site, but not everyone needs a custom site.

I can also make custom Wordpress themes, so if you would like a Wordpress blog/site, and need it to be designed to maintain company branding or style, just let me know. I can customize Wordpress to meet your needs.

I will even do vanilla Wordpress installations for customers if they can't handle it themselves. mydailymystic.com is an example of one that I did this week.

5/26/09 - BWD converts to CodeIgniter

This site had been converted to use the Kohana framework about a month ago, and although some improvements to the site were made while doing so, I just felt that the documentation for Kohana, as well as the community size was lacking, and was keeping me from being confident in my future use of Kohana. It seemed a nice framework while working with it, but compared to my "non-frameworked" site, the speed of pageloads was terrible.

So, the site is now running on the CodeIgniter framework. I could immediately see a difference in the speed of my pageloads, and am going to keep an eye on performance while tuning the site over the next week or so. I really enjoyed how active the CodeIgniter forums were, and their documentation was great. I really haven't found a reason not to not commit to CodeIgniter, but I don't want to make such a major decision without giving it some time. Let me know what you think.

4/30/09 - BWD converts to Kohana

I've always been of the opinion that frameworks weren't in my best interest, but a couple weeks ago, Alex over at webeditors.com showed me the Kohana Framework. In the past I've always used my own "framework" to accomplish things that Kohana does, but what makes Kohana different is that it uses a Model - View - Controller pattern, and it is all OOP, while my code is usually procedural.

I do see the value of using a framework, either one like Kohana, or my own. I just wish that Kohana had better, or more complete documentation, and that the forum was more active. I'm used to sites with forums that move fast, and getting an answer from the Kohana community is painful. I think the reason why is that the developers are in a distant time zone.

So, while I'm not totally sold on using Kohana for every project, this site (for the time being) is a demonstration of the framework in action. While this site is no longer running on the Kohana framework, I'm glad I had the experience of converting my site to Kohana, because it really showed me that my view of frameworks in general was undeserved. Another benefit of converting the site was that it gave me the time to make some improvements, and catch some minor errors I had previously made. Let me know what you think.

4/13/09 - Changes to eatavocados.com

Carl Raedeker came by the shop today, because he wanted a little update done to his website. There wasn't much to it really. He just wanted another paypal checkout button added so that he could sell a different quantity of avocados.

You have to love a guy that shows up with a bag full of avocados. Carl was very generous to bring them, and he knows I love them, so I traded him the update for the avocados, and we were both happy.

3/17/09 - PHP Ticketing Application Part 2

So, the ticketing app I was working on a couple of weeks ago did the job, but now they wanted more functionality, specifically the ability to add tickets after the initial request. I had a solution in about an hour, but the tickets were being generated out of order. Another 2 and a half hours later, after changing 4 files, changing the database structure, and making a special script to update one of the database fields already in use, the add ticket functionality was finished.

The key to getting all of this to work smoothly was to serialize the ticket data so that an array of ticket numbers could be stored in the database. If somebody comes back to add tickets, the array of tickets is unserialized for use by the scripts, and then re-serialized before updating the database. Sounds easy, but it took a lot of testing to make it work perfectly. I guess 3 and a half hours isn't too bad.

3/10/09 - Content Update for teamcamp.net

Tim Dignan came over last night, and I stumbled my way through updating his website. I'm not very good with table based layouts, because from the beginning I focused on learning web standards focused web design. So I broke out the old Frontpage 2000 CD and installed it, and this really brought back some memories from my early days of "web design". Needless to say, we finished the updates, and all is well

Tim also had some MS Word .docx files that needed to be converted to .pdf files. I use Open Office on my Windows machine, and I had no way of opening them up. I looked all around the internet for a solution, and then ended up on my Mac, and used Pages to do the conversion. Go figure, a Mac would do the MS Word file conversions.

3/6/09 - PHP Ticketing Application

I just finished up a PHP ticketing application for a local church's Easter services. This was the first time I had worked with generating PDF documents on the fly. I used the FPDF class, and I think I'd use it again unless I needed something beyond what it can do. The nice thing about FPDF is that I can use Adobe Illustrator AI3 files for the backgrounds of the tickets. All I had to do is write the dynamic ticket info on top of the background. I guess it's a little harder than I'm making it seem, because there was quite a bit of database querying and updating to get it to do what it has to do. I also had to loop through some math calculations in PHP to produce X and Y coordinates for multiple tickets, and have the ability to create more than one page of tickets should it be needed. It was fun a project!

2/15/09 - Gentle Strength Acupuncture

In the last few weeks I have been working with Helen Eng of Gentle Strength Acupuncture, a local business located here in Temecula. I'm not actually designing her website, but helping her with menus, CSS issues, images, and even a little Flash movie that is on her home page. The site is coming along pretty well, and Helen has worked hard to come up with 30 pages of content! You can take a look at the progress by visiting her website.

www.gentlestrengthacupuncture.com

I'm really excited about working with customers like Helen. Our business locations are very close to each other, and it is so convenient to meet and work with her, sometimes with very little notice.

Helen uses Dreamweaver, which allows her to do a lot of work on her site by herself. I just come in and clean up the WYSIWYG mess, and add the functionality or features that she wants. Over time Helen should understand enough about the underlying code of her website to be able to do all of her own work.