Since my last post there has been one major improvement as I have moved to the Pixillion tables in the office. Since Saul left at the beginning of March the office now only usually consists of 3 of us and so I was moved to a much more sociable location with the rest of Pixillion. This has been a really good change for me as I have been able to ditch the Helastel phones for a few weeks and feel a lot more comfortable in the work environment now I am not so separated from everyone. Not only this but I have been much more integrated into the Pixillion workforce in general. I now have both a Basecamp login and a Harvest(Time keeping) login, and my name is quite often on the whiteboard schedule. This has increased my responsibility within the company which is great. I am answering the Pixillion phones now instead, but this is much easier and it is allowing me to interact with some of Pixillion's clients and do support work for them.
In terms of project Pixillion Sessions is now up and running both on Facebook and as a live site. You can reach these at www.pixillionsessions.com and www.facebook.com/Pixillion-Sessions/101042503311836. As well as finishing that off I have done some work on Misura, a Netherland based company which we have done three individual but similar sites for. Although this project was quite stressful due to the tedious nature of repeating the same steps over for each site, I learnt a lot whilst doing it. The first part of this project was to make two of the three sites live by transferring them to their new domains. This meant I had to transfer an entire modx install to the new host including the database. This was the largest challenge as I have not really worked with databases on web hosts before and although I have seen a small amount of PHPMyAdmin I have not had to edit it previously. After doing some research I decided to take the plunge with the first of the two sites and upload a copy of the pixillionserver modx database to the live database. After some meddling I managed to achieve the update quite easily as modx exports the database in a readable format for PHPmyAdmin. This meant all I had to do was get a backup of the old one, remove the old tables and then upload the new tables from the .sql file in their place. I then did an update Modx install for the site which is relatively easy and that was the live site done. There are a few issues I had with this method that might be fixed in ways I dont know how, but I intend to find out if possible. Firstly the install required I changed some Modx file permissions, but I dont know why. Also the files such as css and images had to be uploaded afterwards as they were not in the install. This has been solved in other sites by linking the filemanager to the pixillionserver address but this install wont accept that. Also the files in the file manager are all non-editable which I have not seen before. This made changing css after upload more difficult and I think there must be away to provide access but at the moment I haven't found the solution. These issues however do not have a major effect on the running of the site and so for now it is staying like this.
As well as this project I have also been given a new build to do - Martin-Evans. The build has only taken me 4 days which I am quite proud of, and the user friendliness of the site is also really good. This was highlighted to me as something that should be included more in Modx builds in general, and so I have gone out of my way to try and make sure everything is easy to use e.g. template variable descriptions and a selectable right hand column. I have also made sure that previous errors in my build are not in this one, specifically image sizing, as this was a main issue in the Renegade site. Users are often likely to put images into sites that are actually the wrong size for the design and so if the sizing isn't tied down in css all sorts of crazy layouts can be achieved. I've also fully tested the site with IE and fixed and IE bugs so the site is looking good. One of the main achievements of this build has been my hacked together tag archive for the publications section. Tag archiving doesn't seem to exist in Modx, only date based archiving, and although I actually didn't need it in the end, making a functioning tag archive seemed to be the best and most flexible way. For the archive I needed a snippet that would get hold of all the tags used in a template variable without having any duplicates. I therefore went and looked at the php that runs behind the Manager Manager tag widget as this does a similar thing. I then took this code and manipulated some of it into a snippet which would achieve the desired effect. In particular I got to learn a little more about the Modx database structure when doing this as I required two SQL statements to get the information I needed. In the end I got a working PHP snippet that takes a template variable name and uses that to get the list of tags used for that tv throughout the publications. I then used this snippet 4 times over, once for each TV in the publications and the result was a fully functional tag archive.
These have been my main concerns over the last few weeks, along with minor bits and pieces here and there. At the time I moved I also didn't have much to do so have been able to develop a few ideas for my new portfolio which is good.
No comments:
Post a Comment