Thomas Penwell

www.tomswebdesign.net version 2.0 is now 100% live. We now have a fresh new look. some new infomation content to follow soonish. Let us know what you think.

Just a minor update to this site today.

Added a nice WYSIWYG editor to make it easy for members to post news and such. Also added birthdays to the calender (must be logged on to view birthdays)

(for those who do not know, WYSIWYG = What you see is what you get. Common examples of this type of editor would be Microsoft Word and Microsoft Frontpage.)

This update consists of a neat little Calender feature that will display events in a calender form. The calender script also shows the # of events for the next 12 months. I may add things like birthdays to the calender view but haven't decided if I will do so yet.

Two big things in today's update on THEPENWELLS.COM
1. People can now be added to the directory from the webpage (no more using phpMyAdmin)
2. Users can now self-register

The "add person" form is for the most part is straight forward.

The user registration system allows anyone who does not have a username to register and create one. Of course users cannot register if they do not have an email address in the directory. Any user who wishes to register only needs to have a current registered user add their email address to their profile. The registration system does have a security measure in place as it asks for their date of birth. Once a user successfully passes the security checks, they will receive a confirmation email with an activation link.

Blogs are now live on thepenwells.com

I decided to go with the same blog system I am currently using right here. I took a look at wordpress and decided it would not work that great for my purpose. Since wordpress does not allow creation of multiple blogs (at least not that I could see or figure out) so I went with b2evolution.

This one did not make it easy to bridge with. This bridge was constructed a bit different than the image gallery bridge. This bridge gives the user an option to either use the blog system hosted on thepenwells.com or create a link to their existing blog page.

The blog bridge also took way more sql queries to make it function than the image gallery system. I was scratching my head for about 2 hours trying to figure out 2 things: 1) how to see the different elements (widgets if you will) on the newly created blog. Solution to this was simple. needed to insert the widget information for the newly created blog. 2) For some reason the blog itself would work but the user isn't able to write to it (gave a server error). Solution to this was to create a post category for the newly created blog (pita they need unique identifiers.)