August 2005 Archives

Well, I uploaded the website, tinkered with the MySql database a bit from 1and1.com and with relatively little pain migrated the site from my Windows test system to its Linux server.

Post some comments and let me know what you think. Later I'll incorporate some advanced features from stopdesign.com.

Here are some items that aren't done. Am I missing anything?

• Random gallery image
• Latest gallery links
• Freshen up css
• Make all pages look consistent (comment previews, etc.)
• Incorporate gallery within this or use Stopdesign's
• New logo
• Figure out a solution for missing ImageMagick

What's the big deal?

I just tried it out and didn't see any major improvements with how it handled entries or the ability to embed images. This is a major gap! How does flickr and blogger do it sixapart?

I did notice the ability to display content based on the number of entries, not just a set number of days and see how that could be useful when blogs are infrequently updated, but this is an easy template modification. Category archives are nice, but expected an evolutionary leap from 2.64 to 3.2...

Anyways, I went back to 2.64 just because I have it in a production environment and want to keep it the same on my dev system.

We got the photo gallery up, added some Amazon lists, and now we're in the process of making this website easy to update. I'm using the same software I did for the Lakeview Church of Christ website, MovableType, after fiddling around with phpNuke, blogger, Mambo.

Mambo had the most promise, I spent a lot of time debugging why it wouldn't work properly on my SuSE 9.3 installation which turned out to simply be that PHP4 didn't like Apache2 very well. I decided not to use Mambo for a couple of reasons. The templates didn't seem very easy to modify, but I thought I'd be able to figure it out and didn't worry about it. The killer was that I couldn't figure out how to remove complete sections from the main index page like the silly newsflash. Completely removing the category, sections, and items associated with it left it in. It was probably related to the template, but I figured that I'd learn more about MovableType, how to use it effectively for other projects as well.

The next big thing for my is to use the latest and greatest MovableType, 3.2. The version I'm using doesn't allow the user to easily embed images into an entry.

For the little things left, I have to update the templates, create linkages to specifc archives for categories on the category pages, create a new header image, implement search (stretch goal), and integrate the gallery within the site rather than launching another page.

Minor tweaks after that I'll keep plugging away at as I get time like really implementing RSS, making all the pages dynamic through PHP/MySql like the Chruch's MediaCenter page.