IT'S ALIVE! My private CMSMS site has gone live!

[nhaack]

Hello community,

I am proud to present my first CMSMS site . It is my private website replacing the construction message being online for years now. I wasn't much of a coder or webprogrammer before (ok, I know some html and basic CSS/PHP/MySQL), and I didn't know much about CMS architecture when I started roughly 5 months ago. But with many weekends spent and countless forum posts read I could finally finish it. I wanted to do everything on my own (which also why it took me so long  ), so except for some CSS tricks and Javascripting, everything you see on the site is made by me. 

A BIG thank you goes to you! I could get solutions for nearly everything or at least a hint to continue! A special thank you goes to the ones who have answered my questions in the forum (calguy, cjg, cyberman, dam).

The site features a blog containing various topics, an image section for my photography and a miscellaneous section for information pages.

The site is based on the current CMS Version 1.2.3 "Black Rock" and features the following functions:
- Automatic blog functionality (index, categories and archive) based on regular content pages/structure (own tags)
- RSS Feed of Blog Section for newest entries - based on regular content structure (own tag)
- Teaser-Elements loading subpage summaries to a higher level - images category pages (own tag)
- Tell-a-friend Form (Master Recommend V3)
- Site Search (PiSearch Module)
- Semacodes for most pages (external php library)
- Comments with Captcha Support for images and articles (Comments module)
- Rating function for images and articles (RateThis Module)
- TrueType Text for page headlines and date (TrueTypeText module)


I still need to put in some content though, it's just three articles and a few images at the moment. Further ToDos are:
- Style sitemap and contact form
- Replace site images with improved versions
- Creating a gallery template
- Creating a mobile template for blog-home
- Creating a mobile template for image pages
- Improve Rating-Form styling
- CSS for Printing
- include rating results in blog-index and image category pages

Feel free to post comments, download, rate or recommend images/articles or do whatever you like on the site. Please let me know when you experience any bugs and tell my what you like, dislike and think.

At a later stage, I will make the blog, rss and teaser-tags available for download. But first of all I want to see how they cope with the real site, then I need to comment them and clean up. But now as I have the site mainly finished, I gonna spend some time on other projects of me (I need to see something different than my PC screens).

All talk, no do. Here comes the link: http://www.opticalvalve.com

thank you, enjoy the site
nils

[Gosha]

Ooh, I like this!  Every thing is put together well.

[hexdj]

Nicely done!

[nhaack]

I now added the articles semacodes to the article abstracts on index pages ->home/blog and ->photos->sub-categories.

@Sven: thanks for the hints. I actually forgot to take this no longer used reference out of the page. Thanks for pointing out.

For the CSS caused break line on hover I couldn't find a real solution. I narrowed the box slightly, so now the title's line break is also there without hover. However, the thing will ocassionally happen again when I have words of certain lengths that just fit when not being bold. Probably I drop the bold styling.

regards
nils

[cnymike]

Nils, this is an exceptionally good looking site. Excellent design.

Have you run it through validation though?  http://validator.w3.org/

Michael

[nhaack]

Hi Michael,

Mhh, it was all cool this morning. But thanks for pointing out, I think I forgot something when I added the semacode for the articles. One just shouldn't try things out on a productive site and especially not when tired I'll go on and fix it right away.

greetings
Nils

----
edit:
Yes indeed, I forgot to close a link tag on the blog index tag (around the semacode), so the error was repeated for each entry. However, the youtube code is still not valid. But it seems to work out in FF and Ie.

[neophron]

Hi,

check http://www.opticalvalve.com/blackwhite.htm the link is broken. You should activate the 404 page. I like your site, I will inspect it carefully later.

neophron

P.S. I am also a xinger

[nhaack]

Hey neophron, I just fixed the 404. The problem was, I had server side error page active, which captured pages not covered by the rewrite rules (and I didn't check for wrong pages ending with .htm). I now added a CMSMS error page as well (so I have both). Thanks for the hint.

And I finally put some content under black and white, though it's more like a scribble version of an image, so no missing pages any more.

However, I still have to fix the validation error with youtube videos and I need to rearrange some content and elements to improve usability. But I think that's something for the weekend.

regards
Nils