Betarelease Design Team

The end is nigh

promper — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 22:10:35 +0000

Angela has informed students of the requirements to submit the paperwork. There should be an individual report on how we perform during the project and a group report to include the following:

Please find below guide of what you need to include in your submission:

1. All rough ideas, sketchbook work

2. Research

3. CD with all digital files

4. An individual report

5. Web address for the team blog
From Angela:

As I said earlier today I need you to submit all the above in one folder I will bring a folder tomorrow to show you what I mean. All the teams should submit a collective folder with all the above not separate folders from each member of the team.

I will explain more tomorrow

Thank yo

4 days left…the story so far.

promper — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 12:34:48 +0000

It has been a long journey to this final week in this Betarelease project. The story goes that we had a good start point and we were quite excited about the idea of creating a website for the students in the final project. That eagerness translated into a fresh design which captured the moment- simple in the outline, fresh to the viewer, easy to understand with strong semiotics meaning. The technical side of the project proved to be far more tricky than expected initially. The back-and-forth of the back-end side of the website ranged from the CMS of Joomla, Mambo and WordPress, being the latter the final option after lengthy discussions and research.

The current sample website keeps little resemblance to the original design, yet it is meant to keep some stylish approach. The feel-and-look of the wordpress setting is based upon the use of Atahualpa theme , with 268 customizable options. A few modifications and tweaks produced the current prototype.

The site have been structured in the following hierarchy:

Betarelease (as a home page)
London School of Communication (as a LCC resource page)
Students (with a directory of students who are authors.
Courses, which are divided as follows
- Course ( An add-on page with basic information for the course. It exists due to technical requirements as it replaces the non deletable Uncategorized category.
- ABC Courses
  - 3D Modelling and Animation
  - Digital Origination
- Digital Media
  - Fda Digital Media
  - BA Digital Media
- Games Design
  - Fda Games Design
  - BA Games Design

Extra functionality is achieved by using the plugins:

Admininize, it controls the access of the different users, in this case authors, to the different elements of WordPress back-end
RegisterPlus, it allows more options for new users when registering with Betarelease
Socialise, it adds social sharing options
Grand Flash Gallery, a Flash-based gallery creator for photos, videos and media.
Profiler and Connections, both provide a directory of students/authors. Profiler works better for the purpose of showing the author’s profile though Connections is a more complex and complete directory plugin.

A Twitter account can be set up for betarelease account and a widget added in the widget area showing the latest addition to the twitter account.

Meeting Tommorrow

aakande1 — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 13:56:35 +0000

11 am in w 209

New Direction

aakande1 — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 13:29:20 +0000

We have decided that we need to go in a new direction with the site as we haven’t been able to create the site that we need. I will update the post with pictures of our new site.

Introducing Elastic: A visual theme editor and theme engine for WordPress.

promper — Mon, 24 May 2010 22:30:02 +0000

Good tutorials in wordpress and a good site for reference.

promper — Mon, 24 May 2010 18:56:56 +0000

Building Custom WordPress Theme

(Excerpt of the full article in http://www.webdesignerwall.com/tutorials/building-custom-wordpress-theme/ )

This is the Chapter II of the Complete WordPress Theme Guide series. This chapter will show you how to build a custom WordPress theme. Although the Codex site provides very good documentations on how to create a theme, but I find it too complicated for a beginner. In this tutorial, I will explain the basics of how WordPress theme works and show you how to convert a static HTML template into a theme. No PHP skill is required, but you need Photoshop and CSS skills to create your own design…..

An example of Web Fonts from Monotype Imaging

Jem — Mon, 24 May 2010 13:54:10 +0000

Monotype Imaging have release their Beta of Web Fonts, so instead of being restricted to fonts that users have commonly installed on their computers, we can pick from thousands of fonts and just use a line of code in our website. Web Fonts allows full styling using CSS.

Web Fonts is supported by most browsers, although it did not work on the iPhone.

The Beta Release site will be typeset in Amasis MT using Web Fonts.

Click here for an example

Tasks set

aakande1 — Mon, 24 May 2010 13:37:31 +0000

Jem and I will be finishing the html code for the site ready to be made into a wordpress theme.

Marko and Leah are lookibg into plugins and which one will be the best fit for the site.

Pedro is looking into converting the html code made by dreamweaver into php to be used for the wordpress site.

Betarelease 4 (Pedro’s attempts)

promper — Sun, 23 May 2010 20:58:39 +0000

35 Tips Tricks To Manage and Handle Multi-Author Blogs

By Hongkiat

This link lists several of the plugins I used in the new mock-up, of which I installed the following.

It worked!!

promper — Sat, 22 May 2010 17:11:37 +0000

Ok, there were something issues regarding the display of the photos in the html template. If you visit my testsite you will find that each of the coloured rectangle takes you to a page per course. This is the way I managed to get it done:

Uploaded photos into an IMAGE folder within the THEME folder
I created a blank test_beta.php within the THEME folder
I took the .html code from Ade and I copied within my test_beta.php. I also added a header /* …. (look at a previous post) ..*/ to name the new page template
Using a editor I added the php code needed to find the images and I also added the links to each course page ID’s (which I created prior to do this)
I created a HOME Page in wordpress and selected the test_beta as the template for it.
In Administration settings, I chose a static page as Front Page and chose my HOME page.

So far the results have been good. I need to explore a bit more with the next two static pages.