I was getting tired of the old layout for this blog so I decided to spend the afternoon looking for new themes.   I am a big fan of the minimalist themes and from when I first started using Wordpress I couldn’t find  many good ones to start with.  That was two years ago.

Today all I had to do was type in “minimalist wordpress theme” into Google and right away I found,  20 beautiful minimilast themes! I think I downloaded half of them before I decided that the structure theme will be the starting point for AO’s next blog skin. It only took a couple hours in photoshop and dreamweaver to create new logos and modify the php to get the theme looking like what you see now.

I’ve been planning on creating a personal blog for myself (Adrian Maurer) and now, with all these themes at my fingertips, I am even more inspired to do so.  But first I have to get cracking on V.  Maybe I will use the Wordpress framework for V? This is definitely something to consider. I really like the spectrum theme from WooThemes.  What do you think? Let me know in the comments.

Great little comic that came up today in my reader.  I thought the open-source community might enjoy this.

http://xkcd.com/743/

Alright, in my previous post I taked about CodeIgniter which is a powerful open source PHP framework and how much it has helped me up to now in making a website for V.  I think now I’ve done as much as I can now with this framework, at least for my needs at the moment.  Later I plan to optimize my PHP and take better advantage of CodeIgniter however, my skill level is not at that level yet and I don’t want to over kill this site right now.

The next step than was to figure out my navigation methods and what language will best help me to do it.  Fernando, who I also mentioned in my previous post suggested that I use Mootools library.  I was all for it until Vladimir Drizhepolov aka Vovko aka “Voldemort” reminded my of the jquery library.  It didn’t take much thought to realize that jquery is more popular and will likely have more references on the internets to aid me in my programming – it also helped that it is open source and so I can blog about it on PlanetCDOT!

Now, rather than learning SQL and something called Rational Rose (bleh!)  I began writing my javascript to load my pages into my content div’s and animating transitions with Vlad’s assistance.

Here is how it turned out:

V – May 21, 2010 (screen cast)

Here is the code that helped me do it:

myscript (javascript that uses the jquery library)

Adrian.

This week I began building a site for V using PHP and MySQL technology. I’ll admit when it comes to PHP I am a complete noob but I was determined to write this site from scratch and by the end of it hopefully be a pro! But here is how it really played out…

I would say I got as far as parsing the header, body and footer dynamically into an index.php file before my brain seized up. I was stuck and so I decided to send out a cry for help on the internets. Lucky for me Fernando Ferraz, who fortunately just added me to FB after disappearing from the face of the earth for years and then comes back a competent programer,  answered the call.  His suggestion was, “Why the f*** are you starting from scratch you noob, use CodeIgniter.” He than began to explain to me that CodeIgniter (CI) is an open source PHP application framework that uses MVC (model view controller) architecture that I can install and use to build my site.

Ok cool but whats that?

In a nutshell it pretty much gives you all the scripts you need to start a secure, flexible, and easy to manage dynamic site and all you have to do is change a bit of text in a few config files. However, as easy as that sounds only after playing with CI and pulling my teeth out for 7 hours is really when I began to grasp the application and start to love it.

So why is CI so great, well its because of the MVC architecture I mentioned earlier.  MVC uses ‘controllers’ which are simply .php files that you can refer to in your code that will parse all your pages for you, as opposed to using the include function to parse different files, noob.  In other words imagine writing different modules of code that will contain different classes and functions that will be combined for you as you need them.  This is likely poor terminology but I’m calling it object oriented scripting!

I recommend to everyone if you ever decide to learn PHP definitely check out CI. And thank you to Hutch[S] and bwoodall at irc.freenode.net/codeigniter for answering all my silly questions!

Now to figure out how to create XML from the tables!…sigh.

Adrian.

“If Michael Angelo were alive today he would be making games.” – Karren Ettouny, MM