Wordpress

Double S Carpet & Supply Website

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

I have finished working on another website while working with Cody Scott of Kinetic Media Solutions, its called Double S Carpet and Supply. I implemented and developed this website once again using the WordPress backend.   There are several reasons I love using the wordpress backend on these types of projects. One reason is that they have tons of widgets or plugins to use for free, and this saves me time if the client wants a certain feature. I used the Flash Video Player Plugin for the video on the front page, it has some really great features like hiding the controls and auto play, and you can easily change all these settings on the settings page on the dashboard of wordpress, it doesn’t get much easier than that.

Cody and I each came up with a design for this site and I have attached the images below, mine is the second. For my design, I used an image called “Dark Wood” by ~zygat3r from deviantART as the background but in the end we decided to go with Cody’s Design.

doubleswebsite doubleswebsiteV2

Lime Aid Partnership Website

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009

I have finished working on another website for a client named Shannon Jacuzzi. The website is LimeaidPartnership, and it’s purpose is to  promote national awareness of stress and mental health issues during May Mental Health month and year-round through community events, promotions and campaigns that help raise funds to support organizations that educate the public about the brain, provide mental health services, and/or research treatments and causes of mental health stressors. I designed the site completely myself based off a flyer the client gave me and I developed it using the wordpress framework. Once again, thank you wordpress for building such an awesome CMS. Here I used the wordpress backend so the user could go onto the site herself and make updates as well as change any of the content on the pages.

limeaidpartnershipWebsite

WordPress Flash Design Template

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

For the past month or so I have been working with Patrick Segarel, who is also a web developer and designer. He had contacted me about working on a project with him, which was integrating WordPress as a Flash site’s CMS. We both want to be able to use  WordPress’ functions in Flash as a way to access the database information. I have posted about wanting to do this before and when the opportunity arose to work with a fellow developer I quickly said yes.

The first thing I had to do was set up a localhost server to be able to test on, so I used WAMP. The second thing was to download the Zend Framework and put it on my localhost, and make sure it was working properly.  Patrick had been working on this a little while before me so he had a file structure in place already that I needed to mimic, so he setup a SVN on googlecode, and I downloaded it and am in the process of setting it up on my end.  Setting up the work enviroment will probably take the longest to do but as soon as we get that done it will be a lot of fun, and I look forward to it. Patrick wanted me to design a layout for the site and I came up with what’s below. I was pretty happy with the outcome, and I think I might create non-flash based WordPress template from it to sell on ThemeForest.net.

wpdesigntemplate

Cya

Update: WordPress and Flash Integration part III

Wednesday, March 11th, 2009

Well, I finally had a little bit of free time and I wanted to rework all my wordpress and flash integrations stuff into ActionScript 3.  There were a couple of interesting things that came up while working on this as well.  You can’t tween the alpha property of a textfield created in actionscript (unless you use a simple hack that I found out in the Flash live-docs online).  You have to change the blendmode style to “LAYER”, or another type, as long as its not the default style type. Weird but at least I got it to work. Also, I was going to implement the tweens using TweenLite but they also have problems accessing textfield properities, too.

Here is the swf, and below is the actionscript 3:

wordpressflashex4

package  {
    import flash.display.MovieClip;
    import flash.display.BlendMode;
    import flash.events.Event;
    import flash.net.URLLoader;
    import flash.net.URLRequest;
    import flash.text.*;
    import fl.transitions.Tween;
    import fl.transitions.TweenEvent;
    import fl.transitions.easing.*;
 
    /*
    * Redo of scott rockers's wordpress to flash integration but in AS3 and as3wordpressFlash class file
    */
    public class AS3WordpressFlash extends MovieClip {
 
        public var i:uint = 0;
        public var titleList:XMLList;
        public var linkList:XMLList;
        public var tf:TextField;
        public var format:TextFormat;
        public var tweenIt:Tween;
        public var tweenIt2:Tween;
        public var theXML:XML;
        public var loader:URLLoader = new URLLoader();
 
        public function AS3WordpressFlash() {
            loader.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, loadXML);
            loader.load(new URLRequest("http://www.scottrockers.com/blog/wp-rss2.php"));
        }
 
        function loadXML(e:Event):void {
            theXML = new XML(e.target.data);
            titleList = theXML.channel.item.title;
            linkList = theXML.channel.item.link;
            createTextFields(titleList, linkList);
        }
 
        function createTextFields(titles:XMLList, links:XMLList):void {
            format = new TextFormat();
            format.font = "Arial";
            format.color = 0xFFFFFF;
            format.size = 14;
 
            for (i = 0; i < 5; i++) {
                tf = new TextField();
                tf.blendMode = BlendMode.LAYER;
                tf.width = 10;
                tf.selectable = false;
                tf.autoSize = TextFieldAutoSize.CENTER;
                tf.x = (stage.width)/2;
                tf.y = -20;
                tf.htmlText = "<a href="&quot;+ links[i] +&quot;" target="_blank">" + titles[i] + "</a>";
                tf.setTextFormat(format);
                addChild(tf);
                tweenIt = new Tween(tf, "y", Elastic.easeOut, -20, 50 + (i * 30), 30 + (i * 15), false);
                tweenIt2 = new Tween(tf, "alpha", Strong.easeOut, 0, 1, 100 + (i * 100), false);
            }
        }
    }
}

Update: WordPress and Flash Integration part II

Tuesday, January 27th, 2009

After working on accessing WordPress through the RSS feed with Flash, I have finally achieved what I was aiming for:  I wanted to be able to tween the headings of each post individually as well as make them links to the actual post.  Also, as you will see, this swf is dynamic meaning it will update itself to have the most recent blog post headings. Here is what I came up with:

I did come across a few interesting things. When accessing the titles of each heading, I used “.nodeValue”, but when accessing the links of the headings I had to use “theNodePath.toString()”. I thought this was weird because all the information looked the same inside each node in the XML.

I will use this technology on my blog as well as my Flash site, once I get some time to work on them. Hopefully soon, because I am pumped that I figured out how to do this.

Cya