tcbutler.co.uk

Remarkable; I had no idea it would still exist, but my first website, developed for the St Edmund Hall Ball 2001 still exists. It’s hideously plastered with adverts now; the disadvantage of using free web hosting, but one does wonder if it’ll ever go away.

Have a look at my old website here.

Before I knew anything about PHP, CMS’… it was done in Notepad, with me learning HTML as I went along. It was a breakthrough when I discovered tables. It got almost 1000 visits as I remembered, which considering the event was for just 800 people I found quite exciting.

Made some more progress on the old CMS… it’s slower going today than I’d thought, but we’ve now got a list view for all content and categories, and I’ve spent a while building a javascript multi-select thingy – one of those where you can move items from the left to the right. It’s set up so you can have several on a page at once, mainly to handle the complex category system I’ve built, where an item can be in several categories, which sit underneath different parent categories (e.g. sports > football AND areas > london, crewe etc.)

Not much else. Very aware I’m going to have to write the CSS sooner rather than later, as however good I make the basic functionality, end users will be put off by the times new roman/ border=1 layout I’m using for testing.

At some point will publish all the links I’ve used for code snippets/ advice… remarkable just how much information is out there for all to use.

T.

Right, so step 1 of the plan I started 2 years ago was to get some of my photos reliably onto the web. Travelling photos now at http://gallery.tcbutler.co.uk. Step 2 was to add a load more. Not done that yet. I’ve jumped to Step 3, adding them to the main site, which I think is now working:

[cpg_catrand:5,10]
10 random photos from my time in Australia.

So… right… after months of playing with Mambo and now, more recently, CivicSpace/ Drupal, I’ve decided that neither of them are quite what I need. Using WordPress hasn’t helped, because it is categorically a lot easier to use than the other two.

I’m writing a CMS which combines some of the best features from both of them. The slickness of Mambo, the community-orientation of CS/ DP. The basic infrastructure is highly modular, so theoretically people could write modules for it, but I’m designing it to be everything I need under one interface, one user-management system and taxonomy. It will provide PhpAds integration for banner advertising & management (can’t hope to do ads better than PhpAds!) and while using something like PhpBB would be easier forum-wise, I want the forum to be totally integrated into the rest of the site, so it’ll probably be a self-build. It’ll also cover event management and subscription, email list management and mailing, a fully customisable user registration flow and essentials such as self-backups and file management built in.

Tall order?

Maybe, but I’ve surprised myself how much I got done in the first couple of evenings working on it. There’ll be a long tail of error-hunting and bug-squishing, but I reckon a good weekend on the project will get me to a working prototype. Click here http://www.tcbutler.co.uk/tombola-cms-development/ to see where I’m up to so far.