As mentioned on the portfolio page for ARWA’s website re-design, they came to us via goodcompany.com.au, a site that gives charities and non-profit organisations a chance to tap into talented individuals and companies willing to donate their time and energy for a good cause.
The brief from ARWA was simple. To develop a new site that looked clean, was light enough for dial-up users, and that put them in control of the website content. It was important that they could update any part of the site at any time from anywhere.
With the multitude of CMS’s around — a lot of them open source —
a decision was made to develop the site with ExpressionEngine (EE) Core. The reason for this was simple. End users who have never seen a CMS before get how to use EE within a short space of time. After showing the client EE’s administrative interface they were ‘sold’ on using it and felt they would be comfortable using it without much assistance.
Before EE was even installed a round of concepts developed in Photoshop was called for. (This is done as a matter of course in any website development no matter how simple the work might seem. Issues that can arise during the coding stage can easily be remedied in Photoshop and an alternative presented to the client as a solution.)
The only addition to the default installation of EE Core was the Textile plugin.
This allows entries to accept simple formatting code as opposed to straight css or html. An example would be a h2 heading:
h2. This is a h2 class heading
…which would be rendered in a browser to look like:
Once the concepts were approved a static version of the home news pages were produced – these being the most common type of page. The reason these were produced is that it’s faster to produce code on a locally LAMP setup than to go through all the save-upload-refresh rigmarole.
This is my preference but you could also get yourself a text editor that let’s you edit text files directly via ftp. The highly customisable and versatile PSPad is one for the Windows set and there are many for OSX like the newly released Coda from Panic that seems to be getting many developers worked up into a lather.
The static pages were copied straight into EE knowing they would validate properly. It was then just a case of setting up the templates for each section of the site and setting up some custom fields relevant to those sections. Take the News”:http://www.arwa.org.au/site/news/ section for example. We know that we need:
The basic install of EE as these already setup so it was a no-brainer to call those fields from the template. More complicated sites would have many more fields for different purposes.
The great power of EE (and other CMS’s like textpattern) is that templates are highly customisable. There are a lot of tags and sometimes there’s a bit of trial and error and some to’ing and fro’ing to get the right result. Without going in the ‘hows’ and ‘whys’ of the templates needed for ARWA’s site, the fact that ExpressionEngine let’s your save those template as files for editing remotely really speeds up development. You can use your favourite text editor with it’s undo functions and fancy syntax highlighting safe in the knowledge that you won’t have to copy, paste, save and refresh constantly. (I so wish textpattern had this functionality.)
For starters most of the content came from the old static site. This made it painless in terms of establishing a completely fresh site.
Each page differed slightly and so each is an EE template file. The concept of using server-side-includes work with EE as well. Templates can be called from other templates to simulate this procedure. For example the header code, navigation, footer and logos panel are all separate templates. If the navigation needs to change then it’s a simple case of updating one file and the entire site is taken care of.
