Integrating the website

Post date: Jul 25, 2011 12:22:45 AM

Wednesday, December 12, 2007, 10:16 AM

Posted by Administrator

A ship in port is safe; but that is not what ships are built for. Sail out to sea and do new things.

- Grace Hopper

My website worked and it was not completely unattractive. It had tools, some content and hopefully a little humor. Yet, a website should not be static, the same thing forever, it should grow and become more useful, more interesting over time. So, my website has changed and I'm about to make the pages I've been working on become the primary pages.

The changes are mostly the rebuilding of three wikis as a single wiki. This enables almost all the content to be searched from one location and simplifies management. I've learned a bit about how to use the tools in the wiki over time, and this gives me a chance to do better what I'd done before.

It also gave me a chance to dig into the guts of the code a bit and learn how it really works. The program is not so complex that it is impossible to fully comprehend but it defies minor tinkering and so there was a good bit of reading involved as well. I was able to do what I aimed for though, that being to integrate my own PHP code into the system, building it dynamically within the confines of the CMS. Essentially I can now call any custom designed (and pre-approved) function of my own creation with <?php somefunction?> tags inserted into the wiki content.

Regular readers will also notice the Blog has been reformatted to be closer in color theme and layout to the primary pages. It is a completely different piece of software and in some ways as complex as the wiki. It could not be simply tacked into the wiki and had to be manually adjusted on several levels to get it to both appear to be a part of the same site and also contain the navigation configuration I like. As much as I like both, they do not play nice. I'd like to consider rebuilding significant portions of the blog and integrating them into the existing blog code and then tie that into PMWiki, but the work involved to take such disparate coding systems and rebuild so much of each is somewhat daunting. Perhaps another day.

I've also removed all the javascript that made the blog fade in and out. Essentially I decided it was too little payoff for too much bandwidth. It is a cool idea, but probably best not to use it that way.