Creative Web Specialist - An online portfolio and resource site of Warren Buckley

Hello all.

Well it’s been a while sine I last posted on my blog and there has been a good reason for it, as I have been squirreling away and working on the NEW Creative Website Starter for Umbraco aka CWS2.

With CWS2 I have teamed up with ex-collegue and great designer Sam Grady of G-72 to give CWS a lovely lick of paint. If you have seen my previous CWS you can tell I was no designer :)

With this new version comes the following:

• A focus for this site to be used to help teach new users to the Umbraco CMS platform.
• .NET usercontrols written in C#
• XSLT & .NET code heavily commented to help understand what is going on.

What’s the plan for the future?

Now CWS2 is released my main focus is to write two documents, the first is an installation and how to configure CWS2 document and the second document is a technical explanation of how the site works and what the code is doing.

Download

You can download Creative Website Starter (CWS2) for Umbraco here on Codeplex.

Feedback

If you have any suggestions for CWS2 please put them here on the discussions on the CWS2 Codeplex project and if you come across any bugs for CWS2 please post them on the issue tracker on Codeplex.

Hello all,
Well this is will be a very brief post to let you know that I have released update 0.9.9 of my Creative Website Wizard Package for Umbraco.

This release is identical as 0.9.8 which is currently in the umbraco package repository, except this version will ONLY work for Umbraco V4.

In addition to this package file and previous versions are now stored on Codeplex. This has been done as I build a new version of the package for V4 (new design, amendments etc..) You will be able to download the source and modify it to your needs.

As before if you find any MAJOR problems please let me know.

Download Creative Website Wizard version 0.9.9

Thanks,
Warren

Hiya,
Well this blog post is tell you all about my good friend Sam Marks website Quilo that I have been working on.

Me and Sam used to work together for a few years at a company called Momo Web Communications and after both leaving there and progressing our careers we recently got back in touch to do a great skill swap. What we decided to do was that I would build the XHTML, CSS and put into onto a CMS platform (obvioulsy Umbraco) for him to easily update and edit his site, in return he agreed that he would redesign my blog for me. So watch this space very soon for my site update - all I can see its going to be very different from what it is now!

So heres a very quick rundown of what I done in this project

• Handcode the XHTML templates and the appropiate CSS required from the Photoshop design Sam gave me
• Use jQuery to create a semi-transparent image caption that slides up when you rollover the image
• Use jQuery to create a feature slider, which slides panels horizontally to view new content
• Use the Umbraco opensource .NET CMS solution to allow Sam to update his site easily with new content
• Create an XSLT script to use in Umbraco, to show Sams latest tweet from Twitter

I have neglected my code-snippet blog, so this evening I share with you another easy but effective jQuery demo.

This demo shows how to click smaller thumbnails to swap a larger fullsize image, this is ideal for product gallery on an e-commerce site, but there are many other uses as well.

Click here to view the jQuery image switcher demo
(View the source of the demo page to see how it works, with lots of comments to help you understand what is going on)

This is a brief post revisiting my original post on File type icons on links using CSS however this time around I will be using jQuery to acheive the same affect as CSS3 is not fully supported in all browsers yet, so this is a good alternative.

Click here to view the jQuery demo on file type icons on links
Note: I need to address the CSS issue that is causing the icon to be clipped from the bottom.

With another ‘revisited’ post done expect to see some more jQuery examples I have been working on shortly, until then enjoy