Ubikann.com
Project Overview
Basis
The UbiKann site is a blog and uses Wordpress (PHP and MySQL). Wordpress also boasts a large community of developers that create free templates and add-ons. There are numerous plugins available to add functions with a simple click. For example Wordpress provides an anti-spam/splog plugin called Akismet that is extremely effective at the moment.
Design
Designing commenced using a basic Wordpress theme in XHTML and CSS. However I happened to come across the ‘k2’ theme which was then modified and used as the main UbiKann presentation theme. Headers were designed to fit in with the theme and add colour. There are several plugins that were used to obtain this final effect. A Photo gallery plugin provides a complete area with photos that are pulled from flickr. Other plug-ins include AJAX based real time preview of comments for users that post comments. The aim of the design was to promote the content, making it easy to read, while bringing a fresh look to the overall page. Links are available at the end of each article for services like Furl, Del.icio.us and Spurl.
Technical
The site is hosted by Gossamer Threads on a dedicated server. The server uses Apache configured with PHP and several mod_rewrite rules. The whole site is dynamically generated.
Project Details
Technologies Involved
- WordPress, PHP 4
- CSS 1 & 2, W3C Validated
- DHTML/JavaScript + AJAX
- XHTML 1.0 Strict
Software Used
- UltraEdit (for hand coding templates and PHP modifications)
- Photoshop