It’s not just an online portfolio, its dynamic website software!

Posted on Sunday 13th April 2008 at 10:26 by Lee Allen

Well I wrote this post from an executive lodge within Center Parcs at Sherwood Forest, although it did not get posted from there, so I have modified it to make things slightly more past tense. The major posting delay was caused by a flaw in the blogging system with special characters in titles which broke the URL. This issue has now been fully resolved and as an additional benfit the system now supports unique URLs as oppsed to using the page titles (similar to the wordpress optional SLUG feature). Admittedly, been at Center Parcs for the weekend was a bit of a hold up on a potential full weekend of software development time but I intended to squeeze in the odd bit - and did just that! Obviously numerous glasses of the legendary Jack Daniels, which have got me through many previous developments, helped me along the way.

Anyway the point of this post is to clarify a few points such as the aim of this project and hopefully answer a couple of FAQ’s along the way.

I personally am presently using my dynamic website software to generate my online portfolio and blog but the website software has much greater flexibility and eventually should be able to power any dynamic website concept with minimal effort. The lovely green default template is not very creative or eye catching from my perspective but it is tidy and does its job as a development design (Although an alternative style option will be relased shortly).

If any talented designers would like to knock up some mock designs I will bundle them (As long as they are of a decent standard) with the official website software release. The best suited design in my opinion will be the default selected theme while any other designs will be a selectable style as the site supports changeable themes using sessions. Along with the designs each designer will receive a link and accreditation within the links section of every online portfolio. This could be very beneficial to any designer’s site in terms of traffic and link building due to the potential number of users the software could gather. I will even do the image slicing, XHTML template coding, and the cascading style sheets myself.

In terms of updates, they do take longer than updating a simple site due to updating the website software which drives the online portfolio software as to make the software and CMS flexible for any possibilities. One of the main intentions of this website software is to make some actual search engine friendly website software which makes search engine optimisation automated and site updates minimal.

Finally, in the last post I mentioned I was working on enhancing the output methods which inspired me to improve my nl2para function. Much like the PHP nl2br function which converts new lines to HTML page breaks this bespoke function separates content into paragraphs (retaining list items and other for) and works much better than Wordpress at doing this job.

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