Charles Marshall - babbling, blithering, ranting and raving

IT LIVES!

16th October 2007

After many months of putting it off and getting distracted (dam WoW!) I have finaly put some time in and got my new site sorted... Well, mostly.

Lets start at the begining; I am one of the devlopers working on a new php framework called php-wax. I won't get into details in this post (please see another post - when i write it!) but basically it does what rails did for ruby. Once the framework got to a certain point we started to develop a CMS system to go with it to allow simple updating of content and make everyday minor updates simple.

This new site is an example of how flexible these can be and lots nicer then messing around trying to hack wordpress to do something new. Two big changes to the standard combination are the custom comments module and an alteration to how the content is found, allowing categories to be used in a similar fashion to the sections list.

On a side note the home page also uses some cool javascript and php-wax's flickr api (something I wrote a while back, ok for the basics not tried anything too daring with it yet) to create a slide show of my most recent photos. If this is well recieved I will probably use it and jmodal boxes on actuall content pages.

Anyway, where was I... The comments module is a custom module inserted into the CMS, hopefully I will get round to tidying it up and convert it into a plugin to make future use nice and easy. 

That is one of the great features of php-wax, the fact you can run one simple command and do lots of great things. This ranges from installing plugins to deploying the website onto a live server. Anyway, thats enough talk about the technology of the site and time to move onto its purpose.

As with every web developer I'm only as good as my last site, so I'll be adding a portfolio section to showcase what I've been working on along with the usual sport and hobbies.