I’ve been working hard this past month on a big project-designing a website with an integrated CMS and adding into it a shopping cart and an AJAX powered slideshow within which the client can also switch what pictures it shows.
For the experience and also to learn a lot I decided that this very project would be my feetwetting into the world of obeying particular standards and also keeping my ears and eyes open to the desires of a client.And I tried hard to do this without inserting too much of my own design sensibilities(I like white pages and colored font headings not that you could tell from the way my blogs look 🙂 )
I worked for free,too.And I never once minded that I wasn’t going to be getting paid.After all I answered this ad from the Craigslist section “Barter”
The job required loads of research and testing and for the CMS even more testing.Testing testing testing!
Anyway once I found doop I was all set I thought until I was asked to make some regular
HTML pages.The client didn’t actually know he was asking for more pages–he just requested a way to showcase some products in such a way that the shop couldn’t(within my powers) be configured to do so.Good old fashioned HTMl pages to the rescue.
So I had to find a php script that would let my client edit plain HTML files.
I did with a script called EasyEditPHP.
I tried to track down the website that hosts EasyEditPhp but I can’t find it just now.
But here is the link to doop.You really should check it out.It’s quite, quite awesome.
My client’s last CMS was mysql powered.But I could tell from the way his old pages looked that the CMS provided wasn’t jibbing too well with the overall page design,I.E.: if he uploaded a pic it would be smack dab in the center of a page.This was because he didn’t use the rich text editor’s options for image placement within a document–which told me the new pages would have to have the HTML for pictures already built in.I also positioned everything with CSS.In short I tried as hard as I could to make this image placement as much of a no-brainer as possible for him.
Both my CMS’s show the html of a document-and EasyEditPHP shows all the source code for any document.I pictured myself 4 years ago when I first saw code and so I knew I needed to softsoap the experience by adding on top of all the work a handbook with detailed explanations of how to use HTML with images.
So just when I had finalized the project(short of getting a hold of the new shots of the products that this was all for, I got an email from the client asking me if I had deleted his mail program!
Well I went and looked at his shared cgi-bin and it was empty.I knew my client didn’t know how to access his files with FTP and I knew I hadn’t accidentally arsed such a big file myself.
So the only other person was the original creator of the client’s website.But he wasn’t some total fool who would do such a thing.
I figured(actually just as I am writng this) it was just a matter of an upgrade coinciding with my client’s rare usage of this program.I guess the webmaster was just assuming he could make changes without alarming anyone. This seems to have been the case after all…the program is called dadamail and it is a beast of a thing.I tried to upload and run it on my other site but wonders of wonders–no running.It’s mysql pm’d to the max.It uses many perl mods that my other hosts configuration has left out.Really, the least they could do is upgrade all their IIS clients to this latest version…They really don’t do much for their customers.grr. Another story.
I wrote to both of the involved asking how this misunderstanding was working out and I hoped to get some kind of answer.After all, I was under suspicion of deleting an important file and I didn’t want it on my head.
This all started on Monday or Sunday of this week and I haven’t heard a thing from either of them.I am giving my client the benefit of a doubt but still–we were writing pretty consistently back and forth fairly often(45 emails in a month) and so this silence is telling.
And by the way–the mail program is back in the cgi-bin wonder of wonders.