We are taking over, we are the future.
WP PossibleTriangle™.
Housekeeping (or in forum talk, Bump)
Just imported a bunch of posts/comments from another blog as it’s being re-purposed for another project. Not dead. I swear. Just, life’s priorities have had to shift for personal reasons. Not on the backburner, just not the pot my hand is in at the moment. Err, sorry, Food Network is on.
Back at it
Cause you know, that’s something you should be aware of. I’m not gonna lie. I hate PHP. Like everyone else is currently hating on Flash. I’m hating on PHP. I feel Flash shouldn’t be the only thing getting useless hate. I’m working out a method to switch a variable so that directories can change. I mean, I can change the directory, but that would require these scripts to live in that directory as well. And that’s just stupid. I’m not doing any MySQL. Keeping this dead simple for the end user, which means I have to flex parts of my brain I don’t normally flex. I’d much rather be doing something with jQuery or Processing. Or even Openframeworks. Or Actionscript. Not PHP. Oh well. I’m back on track, and got my PHP-fu going again. So I’ve just got to work through this one little issue I’m having and it’s good to go. Anyway all the best. PS, if you haven’t played Mass Effect I strongly recommend it.
Cheers,
Derek.
Yet another update
Just to let you all know, I’m not writing vapourware. I think vapourware is terrible. And I would never want to be known as someone who couldn’t get his shit together.
So, where is it. Well, I just finished fixing a large bug I was running into. I’ve never had to write code that can recursively list a directory and subdirectories. So that was a fun learning curve. If you’re wondering how that works, it goes a little like this:
$ignore = array( 'cgi-bin', '.', '..', 'app', 'lib' );
// Directories to ignore when listing output.
$dh = @opendir( $path );
while( false !== ( $file = readdir( $dh ) ) ) {
if( !in_array( $file, $ignore ) ) {
// Check that this file is not to be ignored
if( is_dir( "$path/$file" ) ) {
// Its a directory, so we need to keep reading down
echo "$file<br />";
myFunction( "$path/$file", ($level+1) );
// Re call this same function but on a new directory.
// this is what makes function recursive.
} else {
echo "$file<br />";
}
}
}
closedir( $dh );
// Close the directory handle
}
And to call the function you would simply use:
This worked wonderfully. Basically, it reads a directory, lists all the files, if it comes across a new directory it increments up so it knows it’s a new directory, reads it, than lists it under the directory file from the previous directory. Brilliant.
I’ve also made three simple themes for it. And they’re super simple. One is a vertical scroll. One is a horizontal scroll (with some javascript that translates the scroll wheel’s up/down motion into left/right motion. So scrolling down moves the site to the right.) And a grid site (it’s still being optimized). This is for people that don’t really want to do any customizing. Which I recommend doing, but hey, sometimes you can’t, and I’d like to help those people out a bit.
So dude, why the fuck are you late on getting it out? Well, I’ve been busy. Work. Life. You know, the usual excuses. I was in Vancouver for two weeks having a mental decompression. Some folks would call that a vacation. I didn’t bring a computer with me. I was about ready to burn out and that isn’t a good thing (from first hand experience). I’ve got a few more tweaks to hammer out. I just want to make sure everything works smoothly. I’m also using this system for a client. So, you know how it goes, client first.
I know I’m not much more than a faceless website to mostly anyone who is going to read this. But, I keeps my promises. And ▲™ will get released. Soon. I promise.
Cheers, Derek.
Current Status
I’ve decided to rewrite the whole thing. There was to much going on that the end user wouldn’t have control of without having to go through a bunch of PHP files. I won’t have any of that. The functions must only generate the bare minimum HTML possible (enough to style or add javascript selectors). There was also some extra PHP in the layout side of things. That can’t happen either. So I’ve been rewriting. When time permits. I’ve been under a tight deadline for paying work. That deadline ends tomorrow, if all goes well. So, I should be able to get this bad boy up to snuff very shortly. I’ve a friends who is doing all the testing for me, making sure it’s not seriously broken. Bless her, I hate testing, and am glad she’ll do it for me. Okay, back to the coding I go.
ps. Recursive Directory Listings is annoyingly complex.
Yes, CMS’ are the new black
This is a response to a post that Tom Muller wrote a few days ago titled “Is the portfolio CMS the new black?” My answer is yes, I pretty much agree with most of the post. The bit that I agree with in particular is that the underlying platform seems to become more important than the work that is being presented. That becomes problematic. I don’t want my work be second to the technology I use to present it. I also don’t want the CMS I am currently building to become the primary and you’re work the secondary. That’s not my intent. Personally I’m loving the fact that everyone and their mother are releasing their own portfolio CMS’ to the public. It gives a lot of people choice and various levels of functionality and hopefully the ability to customize the look to fit that individual’s specific style.
Side note: I think designers are inherently curious about new technology. Especially when it can benefit us, or when it’s being created by well respected members of the design community.
My reasoning for building my own CMS came out of a desire to continue the development of Indxr. Simply put, I loved the administrative functionality of it. I liked that I could FTP a bunch of folders of images onto my host and Indxr would just present the work. That made updating wonderful. My problem was with the html/css/js for the themes/templates (whatever you want to call that). It was a nightmare to customize. You had to fiddle with the view style, than you had to fiddle with the theme styles. Basically the bits I wanted to fiddle with weren’t assembled in an intuitive manner (to me).
Basically what I’ve done is created a directory viewer, with just enough html to wrap various types of content appropriately and using css/js only where necessary for accessibility/usability reasons (SWFObject.js for example). The PHP functions that create the various content elements and the menu and all that have been removed from the index file so you can add your own extra html, javascript, and css (if you want to) and than add a few snippets of php. So you control the look and feel. I will make a few basic themes for those who don’t want to (or don’t know how to) do their own custom layouts. But, Possible Triangle is strictly a set of PHP functions to turn a directory into a viewable HTML page. Style not included.
Originally the goal was to just take Indxr and fix the problems I had with it. I looked at the functionality it had and what I wanted and realized it’d be quicker to do my own code. Having read Tom’s article I fully intend to make sure that the portfolio is more important than the CMS. I will not be branding it with any small link back logos or copyrights. All the code I write for it will be free. Probably GPL.
BTW, my portfolio is hosted at both Cargo and Behance, and I blog with WordPress.
PossibleTriangle™ dot org
So some good news, this cms project will forever live at possibletriangle.org. Yay! The site is mostly done. There’s a working demo of the wordpress theme. News and updates will happen over there (as this site is for a print project I’m working on) and I’ll be setting up a super fun and hopefully social forum where we can all talk about stuff we’re working on, or not, or other stuff. Or whatever.
But that’s the news. The CMS is coming along. It’s mostly a bunch of functions right now. It’s not a CodeIgniter project. Maybe the next project I do will be. I’m waiting for CI 1.8. This is just PHP straight up. Anyway, the WP demo should be finished up really soon, and everything else should be coming online soon. Cheers.
Download 0065
So here’s the current release of the WP theme. This is mostly fixes, adjustments, stuff. I’ll keep improving the files, cleaning up the code, keeping it future WP compatible. I might add a few more features. If you have any suggestions let me know. Cheers.
Download version 0065. Enjoy.
Hello world
Welcome to the new home of the Possible Triangle WordPress theme. This site will serve as both a demo of the theme as well as news updates for all things ▲™ & △™.
I’m currently setting up the demo stuff at the moment. It’s Thanksgiving here in Canada this weekend and I’ll be at my folks place eating turkey and pumpkin pie. Homemade pumpkin pie. From scratch. Ehm, moving on. Demo’s and downloads will be up super duper soon. I promise. As will an update on the full blown non wordpress version of the project. It’s coming along. PHP is not my friend so we’re feuding at the moment.
I plan on adding a forum to the site as well. Stay tuned. Oh, you can see a more functional demo and download at The Invisible Institute.
Cheers,
Derek.
Possible Triangle
Possible Triangle isn’t really a new kind of CMS. You may be wondering why I want to add yet another CMS to the seemingly infinite choices we currently have. Well, let me explain. Here goes.
Firstly, Possible Triangle isn’t a blogging CMS. It’s a portfolio CMS. I guess it will compete against Cargo Collective, Krop Creative Database, Indexhibit, Core CMS, and Indxr (well, Indxr isn’t actively being developed, more on that), but not really. All of which are stellar services. I’m sure there are a whole bunch of others out there that I didn’t list. But you get the idea. I currently use Cargo and probably will continue to do so. To my artist friends I usually recommend Indexhibit. For why would you do that? Well, I don’t have the time of day to develop my own portfolio, plus designing it would drive me nuts (like they say, you’re your own worst client, it’s true). The guys at Cargo are great designers and I like the look of the service. Indexhibit for friends is great as it’s super easy to set up and customise. Which is handy, but out of the box it looks good as well. Besides Daniel Eatock and Jeffery Vaska and the rest of the Indexhibit community are truly inspiring.
In 2006 Andreas Pihlstrom created Indxr and released it to a private group and later opened it up to the public. I was fortunate enough to get in on the private release. I really enjoyed the project, and tried to help out on the forums when and where I could. I guess Andreas got busy or something and on his website has said the project died in 2008. The thing I liked about Indxr was you could simply FTP content to your server and the app would pick it up and display it. No need to create posts, or do any administration. You could create a simple folder structure on your computer and upload it. And it would get reflected on the website. You could rearrange the files directly on the server and Indxr would show the changes. Without doing anything. What genius. I want Possible Triangle to reflect that. I want that level of simplicity for the user. I did have a few issues with Indxr. It’s not all unconditional love. I don’t think the code was ever finished. There’s calls to files that don’t exist. Cross browser compatibility is mediocre, at the best. The more content you put up the slower the app gets (there is a caching system, but you have to enable it yourself, something not everyone knows how to do). Creating a custom design is… difficult. Originally I was just going to take the Indxr app and strip it down to nothing and rebuild it. Which I still plan on doing, provided Andreas is cool with that.
The new plan? CodeIgniter. CI is a PHP framework that is really light weight and to what I’ve seen quite powerful. I still want to keep the idea of how Indxr functions. I need to start from scratch. I don’t like looking at the code of others. Especially when we have different coding practices. Anyway, there’s no release date. This will be an ongoing project and I’ll be doing some private testing shortly. It will of course be released under the GPL and free. Which also means I probably won’t be providing much support. I will try my best. And I’ll even try documenting. Regarding the name. Ask Mark. He came up with it. I met Mark on the Indxr forums. We’re Twitter pals now. I’ll also be in his neck of the woods in November. He’s also the genius who made the little looping animation on Unttld. So hopefully we’ll become real life non digital pals. Updates soon. Oh, welcome to The Invisible Institute, I’ll introduce you to her shortly, but you can’t tell anyone. It’s a secret.