Sunday, August 8. 2004
For those of you who somehow missed it (and how could you if you are actually reading this), I've completely redesigned coggeshall.org. This version of the web site is almost a complete-rewrite from the ground up of what was running before. There wasn't anything really wrong with the old web site, except I was finding it rather difficult to add new stuff because the architecture was really put together in haste. Coggeshall.org 2.0 is designed with a lot more in mind, and hopefully I won't be re-writing it again anytime soon.
For those of you who are curious, the site is built almost completely on top of
Smarty using my IntSmarty extension to provide multi-lingual support. (Yes, I actually plan on convincing someone to translate the site into at least German). In places other than the blog, many of the little widgets you see (such as the "My Cellphone sees" thing on the main page) is done using a single Smarty function {lastphoto} which I wrote to pull the last entered photo from an album in Gallery. People give Smarty a hard time, but I found when properly applied it's a really intuitive way to design a site and not really that slow at all as almost all of the content once generated is cached.
With a complete site re-design I am sure there will be bugs, please let me know if you encounter them. I am aware that the individual project pages for the open source projects are not yet available, bare with me as I try to find the time to put them online.
Other than that, let me know what you think of the new look and feel!