3mension blog » Development

New ‘under construction’ template with jQuery

David — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 10:18:33 +0000

You might have noticed that the landing page on 3mension.com now has a brand new template, currently (still) telling you that we’re under construction. It was also my first attempt at adding jQuery functionality to the 3mension website, and I must say I’m quite impressed by the functionality and the ease of the integration. Given that jQuery is standard included in ImpressCMS, I plan to use it much more often in the future.

jQuery

login panel

The new template got some jQuery love. I’m using a script found in a tutorial at web-kreation.com, which gives really exceptional results. I’m working on a theme for 3mension that will incorporate a panel like this. It’s very easy to install, and I think the uses are limitless. I just need to see if it has to be added to the top of the window, or if it can be added to the top of a block in ImpressCMS

Image fading

Also, I added a fading effect to the images of the different supported engines. Not that difficult, and it saves loads of space.

ImpressCMS Theme someday

At the moment, this is only a simple web page which I updated to work with the login feature of ImpressCMS, to imitate the ‘site closed’ feature. I’m working on a template that will add these features in ImpressCMS proper. That will mean the jQuery stuff will be available to the entire site, and the Site Closed page will mimic the design of the site theme. At the moment, ImpressCMS developers are discussing a standardisation of the different CSS classes, in order to make it easier to get themes on the platform. I hope this gets a boost and a first version quickly, as this is really needed.

3mension development status report May 2009

David — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 08:11:42 +0000

Contrary to my previous post, development of the impressCMS module is advancing steadily. I’m no seasoned iCMS developer, and neither am I a PHP guru, so it is taking quite some time to achieve functionality some might wrap together in a few hours. Most of the time, I’ve been experimenting with possible approaches to code organisation and finding my way in the iCMS API documentation.

I am happy to announce that a major part of the core functionality has been written in its basic form. At the moment, it is possible to upload files accompanied by an image, a title and a description. It’s still butt-ugly at the moment, as no time has been devoted yet to the templates that should make everything look nice on the screen. Once the functionality is approaching what will be used on the production site, I’ll start looking at the presentation.

At the moment, the plugin is built with an old Xoops plugin to generate the classes. ImpressCMS 1.2 is still a bit too far off to wait for it to get to a state I am confident with to install on a website out in the open. That’s a shame really, as the IPF framework, in combination with the imbuilding plugin for iCMS 1.2.x is a very powerful and easy-to-use tool to develop with.

I started asking around about the feature set users would like to see. My first victims were on BlenderArtists. I plan to build a bit of momentum on the different forums towards the launch of the beta, which should be next month at the latest.

First data model realised

David — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 23:40:59 +0000

The first data model is ready, and I’ve already put it into SQL scripts to generate the database. It’s not that complex as of yet, all I want to store at the first iteration is the published file.

I installed the DAO class generator from the Xoops modules site. It takes an existing database table, and writes a data access Xoops class that should provide the needed functionality to use the database table in your module. It’s rather old (2004), but it seems to do the job just fine. I couldn’t find posts on the forums with warnings about unsafe or dangerous code provided by the plugin. I’ll keep on the lookout for maybe another generator, but for the moment, this is the one I’ll be using.

I won’t take care of the presentation for these first internal releases. I just want the functionality to be there. Nobody will notice that the page is perfectly integrated in the theme when the functionality isn’t there. The theme and the templates will be started when after a few internal and closed beta releases.

As always, If you are interested in testing the 3Mension site once it starts the closed beta tests, please subscribe on the main 3mension page, which happens to be the only page at the moment.