My name is Christopher Imrie and I am a web developer living in Bath, England. I write custom web applications as well as design and code websites for agencies and business across the south west of England.
Absolut Pears Bank Holiday Poster
I mentioned in my previous post that I came across a whole load of artowork that I produced during my bar days. I used to manage a club in Bath and I ended up producing all of the flyers and posters for events over the course of the year I was there.
Here is poster I produced for a bank holiday launch party we held for the (at the time) new Absolut Pears vodka. The idea was to make up the bottle from a mosaic of photos taken of people in the nightclub I worked in.
New year casino night poster
So I have been a web developer for a few years now, and I consider myself very good at what I do. Even though I tend to spend much of my time in front of a code editor these days, I am fully aware that a big reason for me being good at what I do is due to my time doing graphic design.
Even though I’ve been using photoshop for many years (since I was about 15), I only really knew enough to tinker with it. I had nowhere near enough knowledge about the program to use it for practical project.
The making of VMCG.co.uk. A video time lapse of converting a JPG to HTML & CSS
I’ve got a nice treat for anyone who is curious about development process of creating an HTML page from a photoshop mockup. Attached is a video time lapse of a recent project I completed (the website for Viper Marketing & Communications Group).
The video follows my development process of taking a flat jpg (original mockup was in Fireworks, hence no .psd) and converting it to a pixel perfect HTML & CSS page that is fully valid and accessible. The development time for this first html page of the project took around five and a half hours, but I’ve condensed the video down to 30 mins.
Sending ExpressionEngine 2.0 templates through the Communicate panel
So one of the most frustrating things I always found about ExpressionEngine is Communicate panel. Now dont get me wrong, I think the communicate panel does exactly what it should do in a very clear and functional manner. The frustration comes from not being able to use the greatest thing about ExpressionEngine: the templates.
Now I’m not suggesting that EllisLab have got it wrong by not allowing the templates to be used in the Communicate panel, but for some of my projects I like to at least have the option. Using the templates allows you to really get some nice looking emails stacked with all your site’s content.
Member List Custom Field for EE2
As an exercise for myself in figuring out the new Custom Field API, I have produced a custom field type that adds a list of your current site members to your publish forms. It also allows you to display different aspects of the selected member’s data in your templates such as email, screen name, group title.
I thought I might as well share it in case someone finds it useful.
There are things that aren’t supported yet which I will be implementing such as restricting to member groups and returning custom member fields.
MSM Site List Custom Field for EE2
Just created this EE2.0 field type as I wanted the control panel users to be able to select which site their channel entries get shown on, as opposed to hard coding this via the templates, or having the user switch between sites.
Using some simple filters in your templates, (eg query module) you can grab channel entries and filter by the custom field you have setup.
The fieldtype records the site short name in the database, but this can be converted to the site label, id or description via the display parameter.
Talking to ExpressionEngine’s MetaWeblog API with CodeIgniter
On a recent project I had the need to interface between ExpressionEngine (1.6.8) and CodeIgniter.
There are several situations where this is very useful even if you know ExpressionEngine’s module and extension development API’s like the back of your hand. More often than not it’s just easier to use the Metaweblog API since it ships with the system.
In my case I had a page that included a form with some validation functionality that required, among other things, to have the user confirm via email as well as store some custom data in a database for other uses. As the rest of the website was being run on ExpressionEngine, I wanted the users data posted into the ExpressionEngine system once all the validation and custom scripts had been executed so that it could be managed via the control panel.
Web Development
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