MAKE SITES .CC

Numerous people are using WordPress for blogging and in many cases there are more than one authors on a website. It’s uncomfortably surprising that WordPress doesn’t support out of the box a category menu for each author separately.

I was looking for this feature online for my personal need but couldn’t find it on any plugin. To be exact I was using a modified version of another similar plugin but that was until version 2.3 where the database structure changed for WordPress and it simply stopped working.

As I saw it, it wasn’t worth fixing old, deprecated (and highly cluttered) code, and there weren’t any other solutions out there, so I decided to create a new plugin. Thankfully the new database and API made it as easy as I had hoped for.

I ended up with this plugin, that was created as a wrapper of the default category menu.

It is lightweight and can easily plug-in, plug-out. Furthermore, being an extension of the default category menu, means that none of the functionality (sorting, post count etc.) is lost. In fact it can be easily extended and could support future versions of the blogging platform for years to come.

Download the Script

Version: 1.0
Language: PHP
File size: 4,87kb

In this (almost) anniversary release, l tried to include most of the small bugs that appeared after using this application for about a year.

To mention a few:
- Improved parsing of remote XML in administration area
- File locations are now more accurately defined
- Included new globals:TEMPLATE_DIR, TEMPLATE_PATH, TEMPLATE_URI
- Moved conditions for running the engine in a seperate function (checkPaths)
- Better support for custom location of the template folder
- Other improvements for overall better performance…

Read the rest of the release note

Download the Script

Version: 1.2
Language: PHP, JavaScript
File size: 199kb

I worked on my friend Dylan Rhodes’ website called Reezle that just entered its public beta. Among other things I did the main navigation menu for the site. Since the website uses the Prototype-Scriptaculous combination it was logical to create this element with the existing libraries.

I eventually came up with a solution that was both elegant and efficient and I decided to release this script as open-source (with permission of course) as it can have many other implementations.

See an example here

The above is included in the archive, along with the Prototype library, and I suggest you use that as a basis for your application. The actual JavaScript routine for the menu is this:

var DropDownMenu = Class.create();
 
DropDownMenu.prototype = {
 
 initialize: function(menuElement) {
	menuElement.childElements().each(function(node){
		// if there is a submenu
		var submenu = $A(node.getElementsByTagName("ul")).first();
		if(submenu != null){
			// make sub-menu invisible
			Element.extend(submenu).setStyle({display: 'none'});
			// toggle the visibility of the submenu
			node.onmouseover = node.onmouseout = function(){
				Element.toggle(submenu);
			}
		}
	});
}
 
};

Download the Script

Version: 1.0
Language: JavaScript
File size: 29,6kb

This is a community site directed solely to greek university students – it aims to connect students from different schools around the country and create online relationships and debates. The first version of the site was created back in 2003, when social networks where more of a concept than a reality and after 5 years it was time for a fresh start.

(click here to visit the website)

I always had a plan to update the site at some point and then I came across Elgg, a social networking platform that is built with the latest font-end and back-end standards. XHTML compliant, MVC architecture and with many of the popular community services (blog, friends, groups, forums) embedded into one fine package. I knew I had to get my hands dirty with it and dissect it bit by bit. And this site, being a side-project in my schedule, was a perfect opportunity to utilize the platform and extend on it for my specific needs.

I created a new visual interface and did the greek translation for the front-end. In the background I had to change the functionality in some of the modules as they are transformed for the niche target group, for example the user groups became educational institutions and had to operate in a different way.

Technically it was educational as intended and I gathered the experience I wanted from the platform. Visually it was a pleasure to work with a standards-compliant design and make my job applying the new graphic elements simple.

The website is about the national retail property portfolio offered by Colliers International and Savills on behalf of Westpac Funds Management Limited.

Spread across six Australian states and in 25 different locations, this outstanding portfolio offers geographical diversity and secured leases to Australian fast food retailers, including Red Rooster and its Western Australian brand Chicken Treat, Subway and Dominos. It also includes 14 properties for sale.

(click here to visit the website)

I’ve created the XHTML and CSS parts of the website.
I also created the JAVASCRIPT for the drop-down menu and the IMAGE MAP which uses XHTML, CSS and JAVASCRIPT.

The most interesting part of this website, from the technical point of view, is its homepage. The page’s design didn’t allow the clear seperation of the different parts, so it actually required to combine flash and interactive HTML elements nested in each other. I used the Flash elements as a background and overlaped it with the interactive Javascript Image Map.