April, 2010

Development — No Comments
28
Apr 10

The Joy of CodeIgniter

I’ve mentioned CodeIgniter a few times in the past; it’s a PHP Framework modeled somewhat (I’m told) after Ruby On Rails, without the annoying Ruby part. I’ve downloaded it multiple times in the past and attempted to do something with it, but as usually I didn’t quite know where to start. Sure, I could have grabbed a tutorial, but there is a very specific way I learn and oftentimes I need to reformat the material to compensate for inaccuracies and ambiguities in the writing. Not efficient, usually frustrating, and so I avoid it.

I recently had the opportunity to work with someone else’s CodeIgniter project, and he gave me the 10-minute overview, which I will boil down into the following steps:

  • Installation consists of dropping the “system” folder and index.php file to your website. The index.php file is the “application start”, which points to all sorts of stuff in the system folder.
  • CodeIgniter interprets URLs as commands, starting with everything after the index.php. For example, the url http://mysite.com/index.php/hello/there/sam runs a command “hello” with the method “there” with the parameter “sam”.
  • CodeIgniter “routes” commands to a Controller (as in a Model-View-Controller pattern) . The command is the name of the controller file, in this case “hello.php”. The method corresponds to a function name in the controller file.
  • Each Controller can manipulate data through the Model class, and load web pages through the View class.
  • Controllers, Models, and Views all live in the system/application/ folder.

The rest of CodeIgniter is helpful classes to do things, like generating form data and accessing databases. What I like about it is that it provides a nice structure to develop PHP applications using some form of best practices. I just never knew where to START with these things.

My first CodeIgniter project is the “contact me” form on my design website. It does all kinds of form validation and then sends me an email in a NICE way. And, by using their provide form_validation class, it didn’t take the days it would have otherwise taken me to learn how to make this. It did take 8 hours of learning how it worked on-the-fly, but they were hours well spent figuring out how I wanted this to work.

Staff Meeting — No Comments
27
Apr 10

Tuesday Afternoon Staff Meeting

It’s been a couple weeks since the last update. The big news is that a lot of the lessons learned in the Agenceum project have moved over to my own design website at design.davidseah.com. It’s not quite done (I have to add the contact page coding) but it is starting to reflect an idea that’s been growing in my mind: I like the idea of being a “country designer” a lot more than being a “big city designer”, because I want to have clients I work with one-on-one.

So now I have two distinct design practices in development: this one (which will likely continue to be my R&D website), and the “solo designer” version at design.davidseah.com. I’m not sure exactly how this will work out, but I think this experiment has been fruitful.

That’s really all for now. I’m kind of pleased by the HTML/CSS coding on the new design site because it applies lessons I’ve learned through the Agenceum projects. Things are starting to come together.

The next big marketing push: how to target those one-on-one customers.

Staff Meeting — No Comments
6
Apr 10

Tuesday Evening Staff Meeting

Another day, another staff meeting!

When I started this experimental agency five months ago, I wasn’t sure if it was going to fly. The idea of making cheap web templates seemed like a good idea, but I didn’t know if it would fly. Making the collateral and defining the products seemed, to me anyway, based on my own guesswork. It seemed to take forever to make things, and I was frustrated with the lack of progress. Good thing I was blogging the experience, because looking back it suddenly seems like I’ve done more than I thought. The time spent building that first website, putting together that first half-finished catalog page, and playing with logo concepts has actually given me a technical base to work from. And, I’m starting to see the existence of an actual market. It’s surprising! I’m rolling up what I’ve learned from the Agenceum experience into a general design studio offering under my own name; I’ll continue to document the processes here, of course, because this is my behind-the-scenes R&D lab.

I’m very tired from a long day of meetings, so I’ll expand on this later.