Another crazy week

Digilogue are very busy at the moment, with a lot of new websites coming up, and a lot of updating old sites. It's great to be involved with the company at such a busy period. This week, I assisted with building several sites from scratch. I got deep into the Joomla templates, figuring out which modules do what, how to customize them, and what can be discarded. Some of the modules in the original templates, such as the YouHeadline template, had very specific functionality, drawing articles from blog categories and giving very specific instructions for images. While this level of functionality was pretty cool, most of it was unneeded, and over-complicated the development process. I spent almost a whole day trying to figure out how to implement the template with the existing content, and unfortunately most of the work I did that day had to be scrapped. But it's all part of the process and it was useful for me to know. I was glad of the insight it provided, with regard to both the template itself and the development process.

NCGE, using You Headline template

I also gained experience of researching and installing Joomla modules and plugins, such as the Xmap sitemap generator, and add-ons to the JCE editor preferred by Digilogue. I also did a lot of image editing, and got to grips with the Beranis template and the Prestige Academy template. It's great how you can get such diverse templates.

CPR, using Prestige Academy template

GnM, using Beranis template

Technical writing was also a huge part of my week; I updated the Joomla manual for all three of the sites I was working on: CPR, GnM and NCGE (most of the clients are acronyms!!!!). Because of my BA in English and History, I'm very used to writing, and I'm quite proud of my ability to write clear, legible text, which is definitely put to good use with technical writing.

Working on the manual for CPR

Today has been taken up with work on another webcast for DNG auctioneers. I've set up the Wirecast presentation, having already edited the Title (where you can update the text information on the screen during the webcast) to fit in with graphics provided by Block 5 design, the other company operating from the building we're located. I also created a presentation in Animoto, to be played before the auction gets underway, which involved finding some royalty-free music as well. This provides a video presentation of images of the properties at the auction. I then took this into Sony Vegas to remove the Animoto branding. Almost everything is ready for the auction tomorrow (I think!) so here's hoping it all goes smoothly.

General Web Development

Over the last two weeks I've been doing a lot of general web development tasks. Testing has been a big part of this; I have tested the Facebook app that Aine has been creating, checking to see if all the proposed functionality has been included. I have also been doing maintenance work on some of the sites Digilogue has recently been working on, such as updating images, creating buttons, and ensuring that updates to certain parts of the site don't have a negative effect on the layout and style. I have also had my first introduction to Wordpress as a content management system, which has been very useful so far. Much of the work involves dealing with client requests, which is very important in this industry.

This week, I've been involved quite heavily with the planning of new sites. This involves researching templates available and deciding on a template that best suits the client's needs. I have also been able to begin development on some sites, creating menus, blogs, FAQ sections, and testing out the functionality of portfolio sections. I have also been introduced to Joomla 3, as I had previously been working in Joomla 2.5. It's great to use all the different versions and to see the differences between them. As a lot of the work here involves site maintenance, it's important to be familiar with the older versions as well as the new ones.

Yesterday, I installed a Joomla site from scratch, uploading the files to the server and completing the installation on the client side. This will be very useful, and hopefully I'll be doing more of it.

Most of the LMS work done at Digilogue uses Moodle, but this week I was working at transferring a Moodle course over to Canvas. Canvas is a simpler design, and if often easier for the end user to navigate, but it lacks some of the functionality of Moodle. It is a nice clean interface and is a good alternative to Moodle.

I created the introductory Module and Module 1 of this particular course.

Inkling Habitat Projects

I finished the project on the audio player and invoiced accordingly for it, which gave me good experience of dealing with a client in a professional capacity. The client was very happy with the work, and overall it was a very successful project.

My focus for the last while has been on the Inkling Habitat publishing project. I have created several different Habitat projects, using them to experiment with layout, CSS, SCSS and all the different types of functionality for Inkling.

Here is a view of one of the projects I created. On the right panel is the pattern picker, where you can add formatting to the reader card, or you can create your own formatting. I mostly created my own, but used the Inkling 'callout' pattern for adding interactive content such as video and slideshows. The page is styled with my own custom CSS, and while it may not be very pretty at the moment, it allowed me to create my own experiments and learn how to work with the platform.

Here is another example from a different project. I used CSS to create a background image and different levels of opacity. Inkling actually uses SASS (SCSS version) instead of standard CSS, so I need to look into learning some more of that so that I can achieve more with the stylesheets.

The Inkling platform is quite difficult to get used to, but it can create some great textbooks and instructional publications, which is really useful to an educational company like Digilogue.

Week 4 of placement

This week, I completed work on the HTML5 audio player. I ended up abandoning the MooTools player, as it was not compatible with many versions of Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer 8 is Ireland's most popular browser so it's important to develop with this in mind. I chose to use jPlayer itself, which uses the jQuery library and offers Flash components for cross-browser compatibility. I then placed it on the Languages Initiative website and created a 4 column layout to display it by tape. You can check it out here:

Meta Spanish Audio Tapes

Aine, who works in web development with Digilogue, was making a Facebook app and I was asked to do some research on Google maps to save some time. I found out quite a lot about Google maps which was very interesting. Aine went through the code she'd created for the app with me, and in theory I should be able to do that at this stage, or at least some of it, because it's all HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP. It's something I might try in my own time soon.

I also did some work with the DNG webcast, assessing the graphics and trying to come up with a different look for it. I also split some of the video clips for the last one, and we will storyboard a promotional video next week.

We decided to do my Inkling project on photography and we're going to get started on that next week.