Hey everyone,
Pretty major changes since my last update. A lot of the differences are under the hood, mostly involving php. The most significant visible change is the addition of a more or less consistent visual theme throughout the website. I prefer the white on black look to the traditional black on white, I find it easier on the eyes. When I get the time I’d like to fix up the hue differences on the site:
- Main page is greyscale with a touch of red (university pages)
- Blog is shades of blue
- Forum is an orangey-yellow
- Photo album is yellowish
Consistency would look nicer, but it takes a long time to make subtle changes like that.
Other than that I’ve also added a University section to the site. There’s nothing there yet other than pages which say “coming soon”, but I’ll have course info up as soon as the new semester starts.
[EDIT] I also added a link back to the home page from the forum. I hate when forums don’t have an easy way to get back to the homepage.
Nick
Hey everyone,
Yes, I spent Christmas morning designing a theme for WordPress. I know, I know…
Anyways I simply inverted the brightness of everything (images and font colors) but maintained the hue. I always liked black with white text rather than the alternative. Hopefully Vanilla Forum and Coppermine Photo Album will prove equally easy to create a theme for. It was astonishingly easy to do, Wordpress is very user friendly service to modify.
That’s 1/3 of one ‘To Do’ item completed. A webmaster’s work is never done.
[EDIT] I completed the theme modifications for the forum and photo album. I did the album manually the exact same way I did this blog, but was lucky enough to find these changes already made available on the Vanilla website. In time I’d like to make a more universal color theme for all the services, so they look more coherent, but that’s too big an undertaking for now.
Nick
Hey everyone,
I have successfully designed a (very simple) home page using php. The navigation bar is introduced through a simple php script which reads a text file and inserts it into whichever page is being viewed. At the moment there’s actually only one page (index.php) which uses it, meaning it actually makes my job more difficult, but I consider it an investment into the future of the site.
To Do:
- Find a way to introduce the navigation bar to the Blog, Forum and Photo Album pages (if possible)
- Create an “About” page where I will document the ‘versions’ of the website.
- Update the old University website content (from here) to fit on the new site.
- Create a consistent graphical theme throughout the website.
Nick
Hey everyone,
I’m making pretty good progress with learning php. At the moment the test website I’ve created works as such:
When variable $nav is blank, the variables $title and $body are set to defaults. When a user clicks on naviagation options, $nav is modified causing a change in $title and $body.
This is a very crude way to make a website, however it’s a step in the right direction. The key thing I need to figure out now is how to tell index.php (main page) to insert the content of, for example, nav.php (navigation bar) into a specific spot in the code. Once I know how to do that, I’m confident everything else will fall into place (in time, anyways).
That way when I want to make changes to the nav bar I need only open nav.php instead of finding it in the much larger index.php (and all the other pages where a navigation bar is needed!).
Nick
P.S. All tests are conducted on this page, if you’d like to see what’s up. The page is being changed frequently and may produce an error message depending on whether or not I’ve messed up!
Hey everyone,
I’ve finished the initial setup of Coppermine Photo Album and Vanilla Forums, feel free to use these services now.
It has also come to my attention that at least one of these has a French language variant. Tomorrow (well, it’s past midnight, so I guess later today) I will see if it’s possible to do a complete French language mirror of the website. That would be pretty awesome.
Furthermore, Minkis informs me that PHP would work for my universal template & navigation bar goal. This is good, as WCV all use php so I’ll be able to better understand them.
Nick
