A snowy Friday in December

The Arun Productions project I have been working on is finally complete.  It even works on IE fully now after a couple of tweeks which is great as IE is always problematic in one way or another. The site was an interesting project really as it has developed my skills from purely html and css templating to fully functioning interactive and animated modx building.  I started this project originally by templating each of the pages and ending up with a static html structure.  After discussing the project with Matt I then started working on the interactive and animated features using jquery.  I quite enjoy uisng jquery as it is a very powerful and multi-compatible tool which can easily help to make websites more engaging. It was discovered that Ajax would be needed to make the site function practically which I had not really dealt with before so this presented an interesting challenge.  However thanks again to Jquery this became a realtively simple and successful task as Jquerys inbulit ajax functions make communication with PHP very easy.  Modx was also very helpful in this task as it is extremely well documented and I quickly found information on using ajax alongside Modx.  This meant that writing the PHP for the ditto calls was quick and easy and so it didn't require much time to get a working ajax solution.
The most tricky section of building this site was probably the thumbnails navigation on the collection pages which included both Ajax and jquery animation, as well as re-configuring the paginate buttons as they no longer were contained as part of the ditto call.  I have also learnt to use a small amount of PHx in Modx this time to control what displays when.  This has made displaying content a lot easier and ensures that you dont need to create too many templates to build all of the pages required.  Just to explain my understanding of PHx: PHx is an additional section that can be applied to [+x+] placeholders to add sections and the placeholder dependant on the specified conditions.  An example is as below:
[+image:isnot=``:then=`<div><img src="[+image+]"/></div>`+]
Now that this site is complete I have also been offered the chance to do the MODx content management tutorial next week with Chris(arun productions) and Remco which I am quite happy about. This is a step up for me as regards my work with Pixillion and so I have gained a new if small responsibility within the company.  As well as Arun Productions I also did some tweaking work on ECCC this week, nice to finally see it go live. It is kind of astonishing how long the turn over time is on most of these projects, they seem to go live at least a month and a half after completion.  It was quite odd working on it again after so long, and I got to write some instructions for it too.  I had to restructure a small section of it as it was originally not built for content management but should have been.  It took me a couple of hours to get through the various changes required which was alright.
Unfortunately yet again Pixillion is suffering(Remco described it as a sinking ship :S) as one of the major clients work has gone pair shaped and is overloading the workload.  It is a shame, I feel, that I cannot help with this but it is up to the others as to what can be handed over to me and in this case the answer is nothing.  Its a bit of a mental overload for everyone I think but we seem to have managed it this far, so hopefully our luck will continue.  On the upside it is Christmas next week and Pixillion's party is on Thursday(23rd) which should be good.   Can't quite understand why were going all the way to Bath but its up to them, I don't mind.  Helastel's is today as they are finishing earlier but I have decided not to go.  Laser Quest with all the Helastel team does not really match with me, and anyway I want to go home and see all the snow :).  20 mins till finish now, can't wait for the snowy weekend.  Handed out all my Christmas cards today to spread some festive cheer - or at least I hope I did and enjoyed my chocolate muffin for #muffinFridays.  Merry Christmas :)

Work update

Its been quite a while since my last post and I have been involved in a number of projects since then.  Firstly johann finally went live last week although its still causing havoc as there is a bug in the system that I am having trouble finding in order to fix.  I keep testing and editing the site to try to sort it out but am still failing to find the loop hole which is awkward.  The only consolation for this issue is that the errors only occur mainly when the site is being over used at a rate that is probably unrealistic for the average user.  Of course the problem still needs to be fixed. It only really seems to cause problems when moving from information pages to collection pages so I think there must be some conflict with functions and variables that is throwing the system off.  Being that this project was a leading portfolio project for Pixillion I am very frustrated that what I have built is not as clean and tidy as I would hope it to have been, and so I will continue working on the site to try and fix it properly.
As well as the Johann project I have also been working on a few website front-end builds with Modx.  This has included visitor review, hj marketing and currently Arun Productions.  These tasks have included both html/css and javascript work and Arun productions is my second front-end Modx development I have done from scratch, ECCC being the first. Arun is also quite focused on Javascript and so my skills with Jquery are growing all the time.  Admittedly I am only currently scratching the surface of  Jquery and javascript but I am much more comfortable now with taking it on than before I started my placement year.  From working on Arun I have also found an area of skill that I need to develop in browser compatibility.  Although a relatively minor issue with most browsers having similar compliancy, there are still small css complications that occur even with IE 8 that can cause obvious issues with a sites design.  Only today I have solved an issue with the use of border-bottom in IE in that border-bottom of a tags only works when the a tag has a block type display; inline does not work.  Although a peculiar oddity of IE it is still important to catch and fix and so I am learning to take more care over my compatibility and also compliance.  This will help to improve my working methods and make the work I produce more reliable.