So, Brittany’s already got two great entries on here, I might as well get on board with this.
So, our website is now largely complete…at least on the front-end. I am working on an RSS feed updater for our Twitter feed to post automatically to our contact page, and I might tweak some other things to run a little smoother, but the work is largely done.
On the back-end, there are a few more things yet to do. I’m largely using a modified version of WordPress to power the admin section and backend of the site, and I think I will keep that going, it actually works quite well as a CMS. However, I want to add more functionality to edit the portfolio/products section using a proper user interface for remarketing down the road. There are already a couple people who are interested in the functionality of the Lightbox code we are using, but who are not quite as interested in editing the code the old fashioned way to get the desired effect. So building a PHP backend that works with the wordpress code and the lightbox seems like the best answer. I’m hoping to have that finished within the next month.
Another project I’m working on is a sort of testing area on the site here for people to be able to view some of our custom applications and integrations and test drive them, to see how they work. I think this would be good for customers to have an understanding of the systems they would be using prior to using them. This would likely include wordpress, as well as a custom, much lighter CMS application I built a couple of years ago for basic update functionality, a calendar, a forum, and perhaps an image gallery. More word on that as it develops, and I don’t exactly have a timeline for that yet.
I’m also working on brushing the cobwebs off my knowledge of javascript. It has always been my weakest link in my toolbox, and I’ve let it slide a bit over the past couple of years, trying to do as much as I can in PHP to compensate. But with the growing capabilities of Jquery, Mootools and the rest, and especially seeing as how Flash (at least for video and basic dynamic capability) is really on the way out, getting reacquainted with the language is necessary.
And so that’s kind of where I’m sitting at right now. I’ll probably have something more “how-to” for my next article, but I wanted to start out with direction and where I’m going.
