According to our group leader Darrel, we have a filing cabinet full of old photos, note, programmes, and Scout resources from the past 15-20 years. Thats not including all the photos and resources each leader in the group will have in their own possesion. That will be a massive job converting everything.

The website (when its completed), will feature pages upon pages of information for leaders, youth, and parents, as well as a blog, an events calendar/system, and a very large photo gallery. This will easily be the most content heavy site I will have ever built (bigger than most of my commercial work!).

Now just waiting on content (text and images). I’m not being paid for this one.

Anyway this was just another standard WordPress cut-up with a few Custom Post Types thrown in for good measure.

I had to use CTPs for parts of the site that handled annual reports and media releases. Those had to be separate from standard news announcements, and I suppose it could have been handled using say a different category, but we needed it to be easy for the client to update the site. The reason being is it is easier for a client when they see a menu item called “Media Releases” rather than “Posts”.

This project was also where I began fighting with the WordPress media and attachment system, and fell in love with get_posts().

There was a lot of Flash trickery going around on the front-end of the website, powered by some crazy PHP/MySQL/XML gymnastics from the back-end. A lot of man hours went into this project as the deadline was tight and the countdown timer was ticking (literally). Some of the features included:

• Custom content management system
• Custom blog (no pre-existing software used)
• Donations ticker (Flash/XML/PHP)
• SecurePay integration
• Custom image gallery

The website has since changed design slightly (which still looks pretty awesome), but I’m not sure what powers it now.

Though users of the website are not able to purchase anything online, there is a “product” with many different configurations. Getting this to display in every possible situation was tedious to work with, but the result was awesome (well, to me anyway).

Another feature of the website involved showing “products” by “location”. Easier said than done.

There were no Taxonomies used in this site (can’t remember why not), so I had to output everything to an array, flip it, explode it, join it with another array, flip it again, before finally running another loop to iterate through it (and if you thought that was difficult to follow…try coding it!).

Had a lot of fun figuring this one out.

Another interesting challenge, another 10 litres of coffee. The front end of this site was simple. Other parts of the site, not quite so. I had originally made the scrolling logo slideshow using JQuery but we changed it to Flash because the transitions were a lot smoother. The back-end was pretty stock standard as well. This website also had a Unite package installed as well. Unite is a heavily customised version of Elgg which is a PHP framework for creating social networks. This is way before I discovered BuddyPress.

This website was originally meant to include a shopping cart, however those plans were scaled back as development continued on.

We were meant to be using Interspire and I’m glad we didn’t as although it’s very powerful, it was tedious to work with and wasn’t ideal for this project. Somewhere along the lines, I coined the phrase “sending in the tank to do the job of a forklift”, and that phrase seemed to stick.

While the shopping cart part was taken out, some pretty cool map features went into it, and this site was the first time I had played around with the Google Maps API.

I had a LOT of fun with this project as it first involved a basic website with an employment form and later turned into a full web app for staff members.

The app part of this website (not visible to the general public) had HEAPS of jQuery tricks and used components like jQuery.Sheet to create a basic spreadsheet like interface, and TCPDF to export PDF reports. I had some problems at points as I was fairly new to web development and mashing multiple technologies together was a challenge.

In one instance I had to use jQuery to perform an AJAX call which pulled information from the database and fed it into a PHP file disguised as XML (headers(content-type)) so THAT file could be read by another component. I think it was jQuery.Sheet or an FCK Editor, can’t remember. All in all, this was one hell of a brain bender.