courtney spurgeon

I taught myself what I know about WordPress and although I’ve heard Drupal is much more complex tonight I decided to install a version and poke around.

They weren’t kidding about more complex. I went with Drupal 7, because even though it’s brand-spanking-new, learning Drupal 6 when there’s a new feature-rich successor seemed silly. This has stalled my progress some because all the good tutorials and introductions I’ve found are done in Drupal 6 and they’ve scrapped out the inside and overhauled the shell for Drupal 7.

I got this far: ignore the content, I was just creating some articles to see how I could sort them. I was expecting to be able to find on my own how to make a page and populate it with only certain types of articles… this has not been the case so far.

Everything is done with a header bar and admin controls overlayed onto the content of the site, which surprised me after WordPress, OpenCart, and Boogaloo, the only CMS’s I’d worked in before. (Note: Boogaloo is a custom CMS created by Mindfly, Inc, a web development firm I worked at previously.)

Example:

screenshot of the 'structure' section of the admin navigation

For tonight installing Drupal, watching some videos, and poking around is enough. However, this weekend I’m gonna have to really dig into this.

I have a graphic design degree but am now pursuing front-end development roles. Unfortunately they often request knowledge of programming languages or API’s, or general technologies that I don’t have. So I’ve decided to teach myself some of these technologies. Learning AS3, Javascript. PHP and the veeeery basics of C++ in class was the best way to start but now that I have a basic understanding of programming languages I’m ready to tackle some more with books and tutorials.

On my list of things to check out are:

• Further my knowledge of Javascript
• Poke through at least jQuery and Mootools more thoroughly
• Try Drupal
• Brush up on my PHP
• Look at ASP.NET
• Check out Silverlight?

…is going quite smoothly. I’ve downloaded a template that was fairly simple and I liked the overall layout of and have now gone into the Appearance editor and am modifing the CSS and some of the PHP with enthusiasm.

Once again I’m impressed how easy WordPress has made this modification process. The PHP files are clear and modular and the developer of this theme has well-organized css. It now looks quite similar to my portfolio site, though I’m having a bit of trouble just because I refuse to break down and use px on the font. In my first development job I was trained to use ems so the font can be made larger easily by the user and to ems I stick.

Unfortunately, I now have my custom theme which is still titled ThemeBlass. I guess I’ll go make my own theme file through FTP and re-upload my edited files into it. Is there a better way to do custom WordPress themes? Or a standard ‘template’ from which to start?

In my ongoing search for a design or development job I’ve recognized that I should start blogging. Why the reluctance, you ask?

I spend a lot of time online reading and browsing, but generally end up buried under a pile of tabs about an evolving set of topics and unable to articulate what, if anything, I’ve learned. This is both the reason I haven’t and the reason I really should start blogging.

This will be a place for me to organize my thoughts and demonstrate my involvement in the industry, or at least my awareness of it. I hope for this blog to cover the developing field of interactive design and my thoughts on it, as well as odds and ends of development and my job struggle. This will hopefully be helpful to other emerging designers and developers, especially those looking for someone else’s experience in the entry-level realm of web development.