BleedingEdge

Hmm... Yeah they are some good points to consider. Firstly regarding the back button - I would always design tabs which use browser history. I have been very frustrated with sites in the past too. SEO - I do see what you mean. That could prove a problem. Users - the primary users of the site will be young(ish), web-savvy, and "community minded". That is the market the show is aiming for, and therefore should be the market the site aims for as well. At the very least, anyone who can navigate through the quagmire that is Facebook or MySpace will have absolutely no issues with this site - it is designed to be far (far) simpler! Accessibility - point taken, but the show is a visual experience. We're not really aiming at the visually impared (before the accessibility police descend on me, bear in mind that the point of the site is to get people to see the show ). My biggest concern - from the design perspective - is that I don't want to create a site that is perfectly structured, but incredibly dull to navigate and look around. Whether you sign up to the concept of "Web 2.0" or not (and frankly, I'm not actually sure I do), the young 18-30 market almost expects it as a matter of course these days... I hate the idea of gratuitously including funky graphics and effects for the sake of it, and on a personal site I never would, but this site has to reflect the best of movie and "event" site design. Comments/criticism as ever welcome!! Cheers, Martin

Thanks BlueDreamer! As a general design point, do you think that "tabbed" pages (loading their content using AJAX rather than a full page refresh) along with LightBox content are more engaging that a typical Section > Category > Subcategory format with a separate page for each? It seems a little stiff and corporate doing that... Martin

Hi guys, This website is a marketing/community site for a musical I am working on to tour the arts festivals in 2010. The aim is to get potential "fans" into the show and push the viral/word-of-mouth marketing angle as much as possible (we are low budget...). The proposed structure is as follows: Home ======= TOP MENU ======= [LIGHTBOX] Contact [EXT. LINK] Press & Media Information Sponsors [LIGHTBOX] Sponsor Specific Information ====================== ADDITIONAL HEADER LINKS ====================== [LIGHTBOX] RSS Feeds [LIGHTBOX] Email Updates =============================== MAIN MENU RUNNING ACROSS THE TOP =============================== News & Reviews <News Articles> <Review Articles> <RSS Feed: News & Reviews> Archive Tour & Tickets <Venue Specific Pages> [TAB] Venue Information [TAB] Map & Travel Information The Show [TAB] About The Show [TAB] Synopsis [TAB] Cast & Creatives <Biography Pages> [TAB] The Writers [TAB] History & Awards Sights & Sounds [TAB] Image Gallery [LIGHTBOX] Images [TAB] Video Gallery [TAB] Audio Gallery [TAB] Tour the Set Backstage Pass Features [Articles] Production Diary <Blog Articles> <RSS Feed: Blog Articles> <RSS Feed: Blog Comments> Downloads Get Involved! Social Networks Competitions [EXT. LINK] Forums =========== FOOTER MENU =========== [LIGHTBOX] Site Map [EXT. LINK] Company [LIGHTBOX] Copyright Information [LIGHTBOX] Privacy Policy A couple of things to mention. - Only the top level section pages appear in the menus listed above. The subsections/pages appear in local navigation menus in the sidebar of each page depending on the section. - [LIGHTBOX] pages open in a LightBox / SlimBox or similar (overlayed on the page rather than a new page). - [EXT. LINK] pages open a new window as the page is out of the main site structure. - [TAB] annotations denote that the "main" page of that section has a series of tabs in. - <Pages> denote pages that are dynamically drawn fromt the database (articles etc). Your thoughts on the structure of the site would be much appreciated. I wonder if it is too "busy". The problem is, there is an awful lot of information to get across! Many thanks, Martin EDITED: for clarity and to fix formatting problems in the code tags

Hi guys, Writing my website spec document, should I differentiate between functional requirements and user experience requirements? For example, a requirement is a user commenting system. The functional requirement is that "registered users can comment on articles and news items", whereas the user experience requirement is that "the commenting system should be AJAX enabled, and the page should not have to completely refresh when a comment is added or edited". Do these requirements go into separate sections in the specification document? Many thanks, Martin

Hi guys, I am looking for an open source PHP based gallery or download system to base a "media area" section of my website on. The idea is that there will be a page of thumbnails, with a checkbox next to them. The user selects which images he/she wants, and then clicks the "download" button, upon which, a zip with hi res copies of the images is delivered to the client browser. The main features I need are: - Auto thumbnail generation (of small and medium "preview" images which open in a lightbox-type thing) - zip download capability (using gzip or similar) - MUST be php/mysql based - Open source is ideal (doesn't *have* to be free - although that would be great - but I will need to modify the code, so full source access is needed). - Ideally (although not a must) no direct access to the images/folder structure for the end user. User authentication is NOT a requirement because I will be building it into my CMS. I'm not averse to coding features (like the lightbox preview etc, and possibly even the thumbnail generation if I start with a download system not a gallery) myself, but I would like suggestions for a package to base this on! Many thanks, Martin

Thanks guys!

Thanks Charles! Apache FOP looks pretty good for me (I already use the Altova suite for XML editing and StyleVision handles XML FO pretty well). Cheers! Martin

Hi guys, Does anyone know of a PDF creation script/library in PHP that actually produces good, professional results, and doesn't look like a bad print of the web page? To give some context, I would like to be able to grab data from a MySQL database and generate the PDF based on formatting the fields that are "got" from the database (using block formatting) as well as the XHTML in the data fields (inline formatting). So, I would get this from the DB (as a simple example): - title - author - intro - fullText - webLink Within "intro" and "fullText" is text with XHTML markup (paragraphs and inline formatting). I will obviously develop a specific "print" XHTML template and CSS stylesheet for this, but every PDF script I've used has been pretty useless at printing the PDF (and creating the metadata for the PDF). Any ideas much appreciated! Thanks, Martin

Hi everyone, I have read that it is best to design a site for FireFox first, and then make it work in other browsers first, as all the quirks are well documented (quirksmode.org for example). Is this right? Does FF most closely match the "standard(s)". Cheers, Martin

Thank you! I did google for comparisons but didn't come across that one... My needs are (reasonably) basic as far as a framework goes: - Tabs (this is possibly the most important), with the ability to load content into the tabs using AJAX rather than loading the whole lot on first page load... - Accordion - Lightbox type effect (I've been using the jQuery SlimBox2 up to this point, which I like, but I would like to include content in the overlay as well, not just images). - Content sliders etc. for the "top stories" on my front page and other little effect like that - an example would be the Gavick PhotoSlide which I used when I was Joomla-ing. - Smooth image faders (see YooEffects Spotlight, again from my Joomla days!). I think the most complex thing I will try to achieve is to AJAXify the comment system of ExpressionEngine. I know it's been done up to a point as a module/plugin, but I would like to learn how to do it myself... There are a few other bits and pieces, but that is mainly it... Martin

Hi guys, I am looking for an AJAX and effects library (tabs, accordion, image rotator, lightbox clone that loads AJAX content as well as images, etc etc) to use on my new site. I came across jQuery Tools (from the makers of FlowPlayer) which seems pretty interesting, but I had heard that MooTools offers more (and often better) effects than jQ, as well as being more AJAX friendly. Is this true? And if so, do you know of any MooTools libraries out there? If not, then any jQ library recommendations would be appreciated Many thanks, Martin

Thanks guys! I've spent a long time looking at the docs and tutorials, and at other tutorials on the web from EE users, and I'm WELL impressed with EE. It's great to be able to design a site as I used to using HTML and CSS directly, rather than learning a scripting language or having the CMS "generate" the page (including the design) for me. It gives a lot more flexibility. BlueDreamer, quoting you from the first thread I posted (hope you don't mind!) regarding multilingual options: I like the idea of option (1), but I fear that I would run out of custom fields (seemingly a MySQL problem, not an EE one - not sure if that is still the case. EDIT: Here's the link But, (2) might be easier to implement. It's not a trust issue - comments and "registered user" interaction aside, I will be the only one updating the site - the translated pages will come to me for upload. Also, for commenting, it might be easier to keep each language separate (so en comments don't appear in the fr page etc.) The only difficulty I can potentially see would be ensuring that if a translation is NOT available, I would want it to default to en-gb. The languages on the site will be en-gb, en-us, fr, and de (initially - it could become more if the show goes anywhere else). Thanks, Martin

Thank you! I'm afraid I've been out with friends tonight so I'm not really in a fit state to reply fully But regarding your first point - yes I seem to be rediscovering the flexibility of being able to program templates as I want rather than as proscribed by the CMS. I see now (having looked at the docs) that the header content can be customized and that JS / CSS scripts can be included as desired... I've read the docs and the templating system is beginning to become clearer. I'm still not sure about nested templates - I would like to be able to include a parent template within a child template, which doesn't seem possible. If I had templates / structure: siteTemplate // main site header & footer newsTemplate // weblog template for a specific template I want to be able to include the site template within the news template. The docs state that only sub templates can be included in parent templates, not the other way around... Having said that, I *love* the concept of templates being HTML rather than some custom markup (like TypoScript). Makes it much easier to design templates as a designer, and then switch to code view to insert {tags} and logic! I am really beginning to "get" EE now (I think!). It's the ability to have all the benefits of hand coding a site (layout and styles/scripts) with the benefits of a CMS. Martin

Just spent a couple of hours on the EE docs. It's very good isn't it?

Yet another post about yet another CMS I'm afraid - just found MySource Matrix which also looks pretty neat for an open source CMS running PHP/MySQL. If anyone has used it, I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on it - especially in comparison to ExpressionEngine! Martin EDIT: The GPL version appears to not be database-based...

Thanks for the heads up Andy! It just looked like an interesting open source alternative

In my ignorance I'd never even heard of Liferay until about 20 minutes ago. Seems to be very full featured (and the community edition feature set is EXACTLY the same as the enterprise edition). It seems largely Tomcat based, but for a situation where a site is being hosted on a colocated server that you own.......? Has anyone had any experience of Liferay, specifically in a PHP/MySQL environment... Martin

Thanks peanuts. Creating a feed by hand is not really a problem - it gives me a lot more control than automated systems. At the end of the day, for my site, I will probably need 7 or 8 different feeds (including separate and aggregated section feeds, press release feeds etc.), and I'm sure if I code it efficiently I will be able to re-use a lot of the code for each of them - the only real differences will be what fields are pulled from what database). It will also give me the ability to more easily implement language selection with feeds too (it's a multilingual site). Thanks! Martin

I've been really wrapped up lately in CMS choosing. One of the features I have been looking for is the ability to create RSS/Atom feeds from any content on the site. Last night I had a bit of an epiphany, any I would just like to make sure I'm not going mad Surely ANY content type could be easily syndicated simply by creating a new "view" of that content that is XML based and meets the RSS/Atom specifications? If I had a section on the site called "My Section", which rendered a template filled with database content, I could also create another template for an RSS feed, but instead of being my own site HTML formatting, it could be RSS XML markup to render an XML file in the client? So I would have: http://www.mydomain.com/site/my-section/ - which would be the HTML, and: http://www.mydomain.com/site/my-section/rss/ - which would be a template that calls exactly the same data, but formats it as an RSS feed instead. Is this right? Cheers! Martin

Hi guys, I wonder if I could bother you with a few of EE related questions? This is a continuation of a thread from the server side forum. Apologies for the long post. EE is looking pretty good right now for me. I've downloaded and sandboxed the core to have a play around. A few questions spring to mind. AJAX Ability I do have a need to "AJAXify" and "Web 2.0" (as much as the phrase makes no sense to me) my site. This includes: - An AJAX commenting system - The abilty to create AJAX tabs - Lightbox (et al.) content (both for images in the context of galleries and also database content "got" by AJAX) - AJAX search (ie the dropdown under the search box with results updated "as you type". I notice there is a freeware extension to add jQuery to EE. Is this now part of the core (as of 1.6.5 or something)? Does it really need an extension? Would it not be possible to just add the jQuery scripts to the overall template (I'm still getting my head around the EE templating system, so I'm not sure if there's a master/nested templates system). This site I am designing will be the "richest" in terms of content and UI that i have ever developed, and I just want to be sure that EE can handle this. How about mootools? I've seen no reference to it at all... Could it be added in much the same way? User Management I came across this on the Solspace website, talking about their "User" module: It's probably a silly thing, but surely most of these features should be part of the CMS functionality (or at least easily coded from the core)? Is this just marketing hype on the part of Solspace, or is the member content really restrictive, and doesn't by default allow front end registration etc etc? Also, is the registration procedure "outside of" the EE environment (ie template system)? Template System Can someone please explain to me in simple terms the concept of EE. I get that all content (static and dynamic) is a weblog, but how does the templating system work? Template "groups"? I'm not really getting it... I need that "lightbulb" moment referenced in the other thread WYSIWYG editing It was stated in the other thread that I can include TinyMCE "if I really need to" ( ). I'm afraid I *do* really need WYWIWYG editing, but slightly more involved than (I think) TinyMCE will give me. The site will be updated by several content creators and administrators. I, in my capacity as designer and general branding-person for the company, will be creating stylesheets to proscribe the styles that can be used in content. This includes VERY specfic styles for certain elements (<div>'s and <span>'s and <ul>'s etc etc etc.). FCK Editor create a style "list" (a la MS Word) which the users can select to format certain parts of the content, based on predefined CSS styles "read" from the template stylesheet. This is what I love about FCK editor. How hard would it be to integrate? I do have many more questions, but that should do for now Finally, although I am seriously impressed with EE as compared to something like Joomla, I moved away from a CMS where anything useful is a bolt on addon. I don't desperately want to move to another... The upside of a CMS like Joomla is that extensions for tabbed pages, AJAX search, lightbox functionality etc are available and easily installed to override core functionality. The downside is, naturally, flexibility. Many thanks, and again sorry for the essay of a post!! Martin

I've also noticed no one yet mentioning Typo3? Is this not worth looking at? EDIT: I've deleted the rest of this thread about EE and I'll post it in the CMS forum where it seems more appropriate. M

Thanks Derek. Duly noted. There's a lot of info on the website, and it looks pretty good... Whatever I choose to do, I have decided that I will be using a PHP based forum (whether the site is ASP.NET or PHP). It will unfortunately mean manually bridging the 2 systems, but compared to using any "in built" forums that come with CMS systems, I think the site will benefit greatly. I'm trying to develop a community of fans for the show, and part of that is forum software that people are comfortable with (and with a feature set that matches expectations). I have read so many articles and forum posts yesterday and this evening by CMS developers (using both technologies) justifying why they will not develop a bridge and insist on continuing development of their own systems. I *do* understand the arguments, but I also think that they are flawed... Especially when some developers charge a price for "their" forum that is not too far removed from the price of vB. Develop a bridge, and sell it, not try and do a whole forum... But that's just my opinion So, a bridge has been added to the list. Never mind. So, the choices at this point appear to be: ASP.NET: - Sitefinity - Kentico PHP: - ExpressionEngine - Drupal Forums (All PHP): - PHPBB - vBulletin There are pros and cons to each, and (in my mind) to each development environment. For me, ASP.NET is faster to develop in, BUT most sites (especially graphics heavy ones) running on an ASP.NET base seem a little less responsive (and I include the CMS developer's sites in that!). EE seems to get the balance right between community (user) contributions and core modules. FieldFrame and Structure are but 2 that I have been made aware of that seem pretty awesome. On the flip side, Sitefinity's reputation as a "natural extension to ASP.NET" making coding nice and simple (relatively) for those familiar with the .NET environment make it a strong contender too. Cheers, Martin

Thanks Badmotherz. I've got another thread going about what technology / CMS to choose. I have to say though, since I dumped Joomla as a potential candidate, it's great to be able to write the spec document without thinking "Ooh... Not sure Joomla can manage that"! M

I'm still massively undecided Going flying today, which will give me some time away from the computer screen to mull things over!

Hi guys, I am designing a website for my company (so I am essentially the client as well as the designer/coder). Until now all I have done as I am planning the site is keep a text document open with concepts and ideas, and a rough page hierarchy open on the desktop. However, the project is growing and growing, and I have started feeling more muddled as I have gone on. So, I decided to create a specification document - simply for my own use, but so that I can keep track of all the features I want implemented. Now though, the spec document is growing and growing... It's 15 pages already, and although I have listed the hierarchy, I haven't yet got around to describing all the sections and their function. Is this document a good idea, or am I simply confusing myself more? Cheers, Martin