Create Sean: Journey to Professional Designer

Tomorrow I’ll be preparing to hand off my first client site. Everything is basically ready. I had the client take a look at the site and send a list of corrections which I will take of tomorrow morning as well as change one icon I am not happy with. - I found it on a free icon pack somewhere, but later found it it was an iphone icon. Even though the iphone will not be coming to Korea (clients target audience is 100% Korean) I didn’t want to use it.

In order to ensure that I covered every aspect of preparing the site for the client I posted a question on the EE forums and recieved some good information. The best info I got was the screencast from train-ee.com on just this issue.

I forked over my $10 and watched it. It’s mostly common sense, but did point out a few things I hadn’t considered before. This is not suprising since I’m new to the web development game. More importantly it also confirmed that I was on the right track for a lot of other things. If you’re new to web development and/or EE in general then I would definitely recommend this as a resource worth watching.

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Tuesday Sep 30, 2008 at 07:53 PM
Clients | Expression Engine | | tags: ee thread, clients, expressionengine |

today was a good day for coding. I got two weblogs added to my teaching portfolio site created (materials and student work) and set up side navigation based on categories for each of those blogs. I’ve also added a rotating image section on the sidebar using the cycle plugin for jQuery. The best thing I learned is that to stop the layout breaking when javascript is turned off when using this plugin I need to declare the containing divs height and width as well use overflow: hidden.

Everything going very well on this site, now the primary focus is adding content. Once I get all the content complete I’ll be modifying the main navigation to use superfish dropdowns and flyouts. It’s not really necessary, but I think it’ll be a good learning experience making things easier for me once I need that with a client.

Tomorrow I won’t get any coding done as I’ve got classes in the morning and the wife is taking the day off of work so we’re going to have lunch and watch a movie.

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Wednesday Jul 30, 2008 at 09:14 PM
Expression Engine | | tags: general, javascript, jquery, expressionengine |

update

solved this problem by changing the if from category_url_title ==”“ to if segment_4 ==’‘

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Below is a question I’ve posted on the EE forums regarding my use of conditonals on the business site. Everything looks right to me, but it’s not working. I’m not sure if it’s just not possible or I’ve forgotten something or screwed up my semantics. I’m pretty sure that I’ve forgotten soemthing. Will wait and see for a response.

I’ve got a template set up for services with the code below. Everything works fine except that the read more link appears when on a single category listing. I want it to appear on the complete listing like it does, but not once you click through it.

Is there a conditional I can wrap the code it or am I going to have to set up a new template?

{exp:weblog:category_heading}
{/if}
<h1>{category_name}</h1>
{if category_description}
{/if}

<br />

{/exp:weblog:category_heading}


{exp:weblog:entries weblog="CsWebDesign" limit="50" disable="member_data|pagination|trackbacks" orderby="title" sort="asc" uncategorized_entries="n"}

<h3>{title}</h3>
{categories}{exp:trunchtml chars="150" inline="_... <a href='{path=createsean/services}'>read on</a>"}{/categories}
{cs_body}
{/exp:trunchtml}

{/exp:weblog:entries} 

I’ve got this conditional set up but nothing is happening with it - am I missing something or maybe this just can’t be done.

{if category_url_title ==""}
{categories}{exp:trunchtml chars="150" inline="_... <a href='{path=createsean/services}'>read on</a>"}{/categories}
{cs_body}
{/exp:trunchtml}
{if:else}
{cs_body}
{/if} 

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Sunday Jul 6, 2008 at 01:35 PM
code | Expression Engine | | tags: ee thread, code, expressionengine |

Expression Engine is expanding the showcase to have video testimonials. The first 50 people to submit a video 30-120 seconds long get a free coffee mug. I know it’s a small prize, but I do really like EE, and I love my coffee, so I’ve entered. I added a little watermark to my video which you can see below - might make a nice site badge - background is transparent.

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Friday Jul 4, 2008 at 06:47 AM
Expression Engine | | tags: coffee, expressionengine |

I must remember to use the disable parameter in weblog entries. it’s helpful for reducing queries and theoretically speeding up page load.

for some reason this entry was messing up the tagging template. Hopefully adding more text will fix that.

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Thursday Jul 3, 2008 at 10:14 AM
code | Expression Engine | | tags: code, remember this, expressionengine |

I started porting my HTML/CSS layout for the business site to Expression Engine and everything is going very smoothly for what I’ve done so far.  The only thing that is running dynamically right now is the portfolio thumbs on the front page. Currently they read more links don’t go anywhere as I haven’t added the other templates yet - the rest of the site is still static.

However I did notice one problem and cannot seem to figure out how to resolve it. If you visit http://createsean.com/index.php the site loads correctly. However if you add a trailing slash http://createsean.com/index.php/ it loads up the template group for my default site on my EE install. Any ideas on how to resolve this?

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Wednesday Jul 2, 2008 at 01:32 PM
Expression Engine | | tags: help please, expressionengine |

I just upgraded to EE 1.6.4 -smooth as always. It’s nice to see EE supporting the 1.6 branch despite announcements of a major upgrade to 2.0 sometime this summer.

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Sunday Jun 29, 2008 at 01:10 PM
Expression Engine | | tags: expressionengine |

Why ExpressionEngine Should Be Your Next CMS is an informative post by Ryan Irelan about why Expression Engine is the right CMS - well worth reading.

Will also add Ryan’s blog to the sidebar.

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Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Thursday Jun 26, 2008 at 09:53 AM
Expression Engine | | tags: read this, expressionengine |