Levi Maaia, VP of Full Channel Cable a family owned cable service provider in Rhode Island, contacted me in order to update the website to fully integrate the preexisting design with the Wordpress back end for easy interfacing. After customizing wordpress, I even included an accordion navigation jquery menu on the sub-pages with the following code:

function initMenu() {
  $('.flexibleNav ul ul').hide();
  $('li a').click(function()
    {
      $(this).next().slideToggle('fast');
    }
  );
}
$(document).ready(function() {initMenu();});

At a future date, I intend on adding a cookie to remember the menu state for when navigating from page to page.

Posted on Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at 11:06 am
Filed under: Web Development by admin
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The CEO of Boardhead Brothers, Adam Reynolds, was getting bogged down with his website with tedious updates, so I suggested that he go the path of Wordpress. I took his original design and made a Wordpress template out of it and even added a little JQuery for a collapsible menu system. The open source nature of Wordpress and multitude of plugins makes it so you can transform Wordpress into a CMS (content management system).

In order to get the JQuery to work, I had to use Page Lists Plus coincidentally designed by a fellow with the same last name. It was my first time using JQuery, and I can see why it’s so popular. It condensed the code for frequently used complex tasks into simple commands that give your site an elegant look. You still need to know code but if you focus on how JQuery operates, you can do some very impressive things.

The only problem I encountered is that Vimeo, where BHB hosts its videos, does not work when embedded into the page on Internet Explorer on 64 bit Windows. All you see on IE is a white box where the video should be. Vimeo is aware of the problem and there’s a thread on their help forums discussing it, but no solution yet. The BHB host the Porter Lori music video with MySpace, and that works. So my theory is that it’s not with Internet Explorer in itself but rather how Internet Explorer interacts with the Vimeo database. Vimeo uses PHP whereas MySpace uses ASP, so I suspect that is the source of the issue.

Posted on Wednesday, October 21st, 2009 at 11:15 am
Filed under: Web Development by admin
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