WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform, and is one of the updisputed darlings of the Open Source and Web 2.0 world, it’s fair to say we’re all avid users of the platform here at NM towers.
With a little creativity and imagination, it’s relatively simple to build some additional functionality around the core content of your website, using WordPress as the application framework. It’s perhaps a little unconventional to do this, if I were faced with building a Web application from scratch, WordPress wouldn’t be the first choice to spring to mind, however there may be good reasons for choosing WordPress, despite the stiff competition. If the heart and soul of your website requires a solid publishing platform, but you want to tack on a few bells and whistles, then I would say WordPress is a viable option.
WordPress introduced the concept of Pages way back in version 1.5, to allow for the creation and management of static content pages outside the normal blog chronology. This shifted WordPress away from a blogging platform, opening up new possibilities for using it as a CMS.
WordPress Pages are deceptively powerful little things, each page can be handled by a different template, and so is a potential window into a micro Web application. Having the ability to attach arbitrary bits of data to a page through Custom Fields strengthens this position.
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Steve wrote this on 25.04.08 – what do you think?
It's filed in the Development, Web technology box
Following on from Lou’s earlier post about Social Innovation Camp, I was intrigued by their proposition of ‘an experiment in using social technology for social change. I submitted an idea, which didn’t quite cut the mustard but did lead to my being invited along to help out. So on the weekend of 5th & 6th April I trotted off to join in on an event bringing together great ideas, a multitude of skill sets and an all pervading enthusiasm to prove that the web can be used as a force for good in the world.
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Jenni wrote this on 16.04.08 – 2 comments
It's filed in the Business, Interesting, Internet, NixonMcInnes, Social media, Web technology box
If you’ve been aware of OpenID for a while but hadn’t got round to setting yourself up with one, or perhaps hadn’t even heard of it, here’s a two-minute quick guide for non-techies.
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Tom wrote this on 15.04.08 – 2 comments
It's filed in the Internet, Web technology box
Blogging was never my specialty… until I used Wordpress to develop a blog for a client.
Wordpress is a Blog Tool and Weblog Platform.
Nowadays I love it! I wish I had more time to blog. I have a lot to say! :)
Back to the point… the new very much expected version of Wordpress 2.5!
I have just downloaded and installed my first version… I am so excited! Love to learn about new technologies and its updates.
What’s in it?
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Telmo wrote this on 07.04.08 – 34 comments
It's filed in the Blogging, Development, Free things, Internet, Social media, Web technology box
Continuing on from my last post about Amazon Web Services, I shall now introduce you to the lesser known services they provide.
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Edward wrote this on 27.03.08 – what do you think?
It's filed in the Development, Internet, Web technology box
The analytics tool we use most often in NixonMcInnes websites is Google Analytics. Analytics tools help you gain detailed insight into how your customers are interacting with your website.
Google launched a new version of their free Google Analytics package a few weeks ago.
Benefits of the new implementation include:
- More reliable tracking capabilities
- Lighter code
- Advanced features and sophisticated reporting
- New Multi-line Graph (beta feature) that graphs two different metrics against each other over time
- Reports available in six additional languages, bringing the total number of supported languages to 25
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Telmo wrote this on 29.02.08 – 4 comments
It's filed in the Business, Development, Internet, Marketing, NixonMcInnes, Our sites, Strategy, User experience, Web analytics, Web technology, ebooks box
I’m a big fan of YUI (the JavaScript framework from Yahoo!, not the pint-sized popstar from Japan - no offence, Yui), and have been using it fairly extensively on the soon-to-be-relaunched goedhuis.com.
The main reasons for the love of this particular JavaScript framework are the vast array of well-documented and robust features you get for free, all of which are backed up with clear and helpful real-world examples on the main YUI site. It’s a great resource and has been a joy to work with on this project, a credit to the talented engineers at Yahoo.
Rarely is anything that simple though, and there have been a few challenges along the way on this project. I’d like to share some of these in future posts, but one problem I came up against recently was getting sIFR to play nice with the YUI TabView component.
FYI, the TabView component renders ‘navigable tabbed content’ in a format that is accessible for all users of the web, and Scalable Inman Flash Replacement, or sIFR for short, is a rather snazzy method for rendering dynamic, accessible, rich typography in a web page, using a clever mix of Flash and JavaScript.
The particular issue I hit was with the sIFR-rendered Flash movies not displaying correctly, or even at all, when switching between tabs.
Fortunately, our friend TabView exposes a healthy dose of events that we can subscribe to, the ‘activeTabChange’ event being our knight in shining armour here.
Warning: non-technically savvy readers may wish to look away now…
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Steve wrote this on 26.02.08 – 11 comments
It's filed in the Development, Web technology box
Developers love new toys and when those toys make it easier to develop and build exciting new solutions then we love them even more. When I first heard about Amazon’s new web services I was quite excited, releasing their internal tools and services to the public is a great idea that will hopefully benefit us all. In this series of blog posts I will introduce each service and give an overview of how we could use them and why we should be excited! I will first cover the big three.
“Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides re-sizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.”
Translated, this means that developers can create ‘virtual machines‘ on Amazon’s server. Amazon makes it easy to scale the resources your application has on offer, so as your application/site becomes more popular and demands more computing power EC2 helps you enable those extra resources.
“Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web.”
Translated, this means that developers can store any type of file (images, audio, html files, office docs etc) on Amazon servers where it is kept securely. These files can then be accessed anywhere in the world quickly and easily via REST or SOAP interfaces. S3 was built to be scalable so much like the EC2 it will add and remove resources as an when it needs them.
“Amazon SimpleDB is a web service for running queries on structured data in real time… Traditionally, this type of functionality has been accomplished with a clustered relational database that requires a sizable upfront investment, brings more complexity than is typically needed, and often requires a DBA to maintain and administer. In contrast, Amazon SimpleDB is easy to use and provides the core functionality of a database - real-time lookup and simple querying of structured data - without the operational complexity.”
SimpleDB as it says on the tin is a simple database, providing a lightweight alternative to system heavy databases such as MySQL or Postgres. SimpleDB likes to store ‘items’ within a ‘domain’, each ‘item’ can have many ‘attributes’ and each ‘attribute’ can have multiple ‘values’.
Here is the example table given by Amazon, as you can see each item can have multiple colours just like clothes in real life:
These items can then be queried much like a traditional database which means we can ask the database questions about its items and receive answers back, a query to retrieve all blue sweaters would look like (colour = blue INTERSECTION description = sweater), INTERSECTION acts like an AND.
If we add these three services together we have a very powerful platform on which to build new web applications. Now we know what each service does I shall give you a nice analogy of how they tie together.
Imagine a small pie shop that has a small but steady stream of customers, about 10 pie fiends per day. One of the pie lovers tells two friends about how great this pie shop is, they then tell two friends who then tell two friends etc etc, you know the story. Suddenly the little pie shop has thousands of customers coming from all over the place to get a taste of the now famous pies, however the owner of the pie shop is unable to cope with the demand, what they really need is a pie superstore! The next day they move down the road into the pie superstore and start producing and selling enough pies to feed a small army, everyone is happy… until the pie frenzy is over and the owner is left with too much pie making machinery, a huge lease to pay on the pie superstore and a smaller customer base of pie devotees. What would be ideal to match the dwindled demand would be a nice new pie convenience store, the owner ups and moves into a space where he can bake and store all his pies and still be able to cover all his overheads, once again everyone is happy.
As you can see, what the pie shop owner really needed was a shop that had ‘elastic’ walls. When the demand for pies was high they would be able to rent more pie making machinery and still have room to store them all, when demand was low they could return the machinery they weren’t using but still have room to store the already baked pies. All the luxury of moving into a suitably sized shop but without the hassle of having to buy and physically move all the equipment.
To move this into the online world, imagine a small Facebook application that only has a handful of users - the processing power, bandwidth and storage needed is going to be tiny. However, due to the viral nature of the web our small Facebook application could grow exponentially in a matter of days, demanding more processing power, bandwidth and storage. If we used traditional hosting then we may have to find a new host that can handle our demands (or pay through the nose for bursting our agreed bandwidth) but if we use Amazon web services then we don’t have to worry, our application can expand and contract as demand sees fit.
If you’d like to find out more then check out these links:
Amazon Web Services
Building Facebook applications on AWS
Next time we shall see what other services Amazon has exposed for us.
Edward wrote this on 25.02.08 – 5 comments
It's filed in the Development, Internet, Web technology box
