Wordpress works
04-02-10
I have been developing custom sites with my own CMS quite happily for many years. I have used Drupal and a couple of shopping carts for some sites that suited it but never had a need to venture into the Wordpress world.
A client has just asked for a site like another he had seen and I saw almost immediately that it was based on a WordPress template. Some time ago I played with the WordPress template system just to see what it was like but this was the first time I was going to use one for real.
I have been impressed with the ease of generating a custom template and putting together some content and I now see that there are many people out there who make most of the sites they do on WordPress. I can see that the range of plug-ins and hacking of the PHP code make this a very versatile tool and I am sure I will consider it for future projects.
However, I know that most of the sites I build have too much custom structure that would not fit comfortably in a WordPress setup. Clients always want things done in a certain way and I like having control overall the components that go into the site.
Who knows? In a few months I might look at this and wonder why I haven't used WordPress earlier. Watch this space.
Jquery magic
04-08-09
It has only been recently that I have discovered the joy (and frustrations) of using jquery to animate the page and fetch ajax requests.
I am not sure why it tool so long to notice all the possibilities that jquery offered, although keeping up with a regular stream of work makes it diffucult to explore something new. I had also waited for the "right moment" when browsers were capable of rendering all the javascript extras without problem. Like breaking bad news to a partner there is never a good time.
So, the moment was right and I soon discovered that jquery made the complexities of page manipulation easy and wrapped ajax up in a digestable bundle.
I shall write more on a few of the problems I had that were tricky to track down on the web. Ajax can be a delicate tool to debug and some time was spent adding plugins to firefox to find out what on earth was being passed silently from the web page up to the server.
More to follow...