I like Facebook.  I have Facebook friends all over the world.  But my sister in Australia just isn’t interested in the problems of the town that I live in, just as I am not really interested in the problems of the town where she lives.  The same with my relatives in Canada.  Then when you add in different local cultures, council and national laws, and the immediacy of my problems in my town, East Grinstead, get swamped!

So I was pondering on this and realised that we at WebDesigns Ltd could make a whole web site just for my town.

So we did just exactly that.  We called it VillageCow, mainly because we couldn’t stand the idea of a bland name like “townvoice”, or “localchat” or whatever.

I think it’s a nice idea.  I am hoping that local people, talking about local issues, can reach better solutions, or at the very least get better agreement on solutions!  I figure that it has to be better than just reading about what solutions other (outsiders) have decided.

You can also update all meta tags on any individual page, again by simply clicking on an icon on the page.

I will be making some tutorial videos for the site that should help a lot in getting a buzz going once people see just how easy it really is to integrate into the HTML.  The CMS market has been made quite tough for web designers by the requirement for a great deal of technical knowledge needed to get other CMS’es and working with an existing design.

I think that the majority of design companies, once they have decided to go the Joomla route, are resigned to the fact that the site is going to look like a Joomla site no matter what they do.

In fact, my hardest task has actually been getting people to see how simple the WhiteDragon can really be, once they have been exposed to other CMS’es. Nobody can really believe it can be that easy.  I can’t blame them.  I remember installing one particular extension for Mambo.  I thought it would be real easy and had a Monday deadline.  I started early on the Saturday morning so I could get it out of the way and have a good night out and not worry about trying to get it done on the Sunday with a hangover… What a “happy” weekend that was. I got a massive headache, but not from any booze!

That had to be one of the contributing factors for the creation of the WhiteDragon, although there were many such straws for this camel over the last few years.

More updates as I get the videos done.

What it means to us is that we can add a whole new module (like Newsletter management or a shopping cart) by just dropping in the needed code.  Then create a page with just one line of code in it, and all the CSS, templates, etc. are applied instantly and automatically.  Presto, existing site plus new module plus new page(s).

It does things like – picking up the template to apply from the sub-directory name itself, so you can either change the template, or just move the file to the relevant sub-directory and update any links.  Job done.

Well done guys!

Tags: CMS, easy CMS, content management, application framework, development framework

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Tags: CMS, content managerment, white dragons den

So I decided to write a real primer for real programmers. One that consists of techniques and tips that are uniformly workable to any computer language on any platform. There is a lot of rubbish and false data promoted under the guise of “the right way to do it”. If there ever was a programming mistake that could have been made, or a bug introduced where it could have been avoided, then I have surely done it. They say that experience is what you get, right after you needed it.  That makes me a very experienced programmer.
So I feel I have a responsibility to write it all down for all the newbies and not so newbies in the field so that my hard won experience is not wasted. If anything I write down can save someone else just an hour of their time, then it will be worth it.  If you can learn from someone else’s mistakes then you should be able to get a doctorate on mine!

I will keep you posted of the progress on this and other things that I am working on during my waking hours.

This means that firstly there is usually a hefty learning curve, and secondly that you always have to end up with a compromise between what you originally planned and what you are forced to fit in with to make it work.

While we produce bespoke web-sites for clients of all sizes, we also have a desire to make life easier for people. The world is complicated enough already. Why add to it?

When we wanted to install a content management system for a new client, we spent literally days installing and testing CMS systems of all shapes and sizes. But we kept on hitting the same problem on each one. Namely, the only way to change the design or the template of any of them was to dig into the package and modify THEIR template files.

We just found this too restrictive, so the idea of building our own content management system was born.

After coming up with the basic specs (the guiding principle was that it had to be SIMPLE, and it had to allow designers and creatives free range and not restrict their creativity even slightly), we sat down and wrote it. We are quite proud of what we have achieved.
Why? What makes it really different from the rest of the commercial systems out there? Well, it’s simple to install, understand and use. You can install it on any EXISTING HTML or PHP scripted site. (You just have to change the file extension to .PHP (that’s for a Windows server – just modify the .htaccess file on a Linux server) and add two lines of code to each page.It was made specifically with the designer in mind, so you can create the design, create a new page from your design or template and then upload it. Then you or the customer can add the content directly onto the page at any time. We can now tweak the template and upload the revised pages at the exact same time as the customer is updating the content, and without penalty or risk. This is pretty cool.
Another big plus is that content changes cannot be overwritten because of different versions locally and on the server. It’s all in one file for each page, in one location.

And for you techies, the White Dragon uses XML and flat files to store and deliver the page content, so it works equally well on a Windows or Linux operating system and you DO NOT need a database or to know anything at all about PHP. And because all the program code sits in one directory, separate from the content or the pages, the installation and future upgrades are seamless. Just upload the latest version into the code directory and start using any newly released features in your web pages, old or new.

When we created it, we realised that there are a lot of web design companies out there who have the exact same problem, but don’t have the in-house expertise to build what they really wanted.

So we decided to make it available to the rest of the web design companies out there (for a modest fee). We are already committed to keeping it up to date and current with the latest changes and additional features, because we now use it on all the web sites that we build.

Content management is a big thing for the future, because content is king and it should be the user that totally controls the content.