David Linnard Portfolio » CMS

eZ Awards 2010 Tutorial of the Year

admin — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 20:58:31 +0000

I was nominated for two awards at the eZ Awards 2010, an awards for the eZ Publish Content Management System organised by the creators of the CMS. I was nominated for my article titled “Creating eZ Publish Objects in PHP” which was published on the main eZ community site, share.ez.no and also for my technical blog, OneQuarterEnglish.co.uk.

Although I missed out for my blog, I won the “Tutorial of the Year” award for the article, which was initially written for my blog.

Heinz

admin — Mon, 31 May 2010 09:39:28 +0000

Heinz maintenance and training carried out as part of my role for The Grand Union. Training was for members of staff at Heinzon how to use the Umbraco CMS their site was built with. Training included how to create, update and maintain content and adding additional media to the site. Maintenance tasks were also carried out on the site.

Freeview

admin — Mon, 31 May 2010 09:23:34 +0000

For my role at the digital agency The Grand Union, I was tasked with carrying out PHP development for the Freeview website. This includes all of the PHP created for the updated Freeview HD and Freeview Plus sections of the site as well as the What’s New page. Other tasks included ensuring the site was properly optimised for the flood of traffic which occurred when the HD section went live and also moving the site to a new web server.

Creating eZ Publish Content Objects in PHP

admin — Sun, 23 May 2010 20:21:35 +0000

Publication on the main eZ Publish community site (share.ez.no) of an article I initially wrote for my technical blog. The article details how to create objects for the CMS using custom PHP code to enable users to import content from external sources, or to allow the automation of bulk content creation. The article can be viewed here.

The article was awarded “Tutorial of the Year” by eZ Systems, the company behind the CMS (I was also nominated for blog of the year for www.onequarterenglish.co.uk).

E.on Great Saves / E.on Talking Energy

admin — Sat, 15 May 2010 09:15:34 +0000

Maintenance work on these eZ Publish based sites. Amends included the addition of timed polls and amends onthe Flash competitions on the site. Other changes included incorporating changes made by third parties on to the site and providing stats using custom PHP scripts to extract information from eZ Publish.

FilmClub

admin — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 20:36:51 +0000

Filmclub is a government funded initiative to provide free access to a wide variety of films for state schools to allow them to set up their own after school film clubs (you can find out more here).

As well as ensuring all client side code is cross browser compliant (for the CSS, javascript and XHTML), I worked on various bug fixes resulting from a very large growth of the site in a very small amount of time. This culminated in overseeing the successful integration of a brand new database into the site.

David Linnard Portfolio/Blog

admin — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 23:58:16 +0000

A simple wordpress site to hold details about myself and my work recently updated from a custom PHP solution. It was easy to setup and the majority of the work was creating the wordpress theme for use on the site. Third party extensions helped to speed up development and the built in Wordpress CMS is perfect for the purpose. The use of wordpress has made the site much more powerful and extendable and development work on it is much improved.

An additional wordpress theme was setup for me to start writing a tech blog, in order to better articulate and demonstrate my technical skills and depth of knowledge.

ElleUK

admin — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 17:50:08 +0000

While I was working for Hachette Filipacchi, my main role was to assist with maintaining and the development of the ELLEuk.com site (based on the eZ Publish content management system). As well as upgrading the Content Management System, a lot of development work took place on the site. Starting with the ELLE Beauty channel, I developed the PHP for ELLE.tv, In The Mag and the News channels. I also helped develop the Culture channel. I was also the lead developer on the Catwalk channel which had a massive increase in page views and unique visitors compared to the previous year. The final development I was involved with was for a new look homepage.

Developments for the site involved utilising the features of the eZ Publish CMS. Presentation logic was all carried out in the SMARTY style templating language eZ Publish uses. As well as this new extensions for the CMS were created to carry out such tasks as bulk image uploading and providing convenient access to custom database logic required on the site. One of the biggest extensions I built during my time there was a Keywording extension to ensure consistency throughout the keywords and to provide an easier interface for both adding keywords to articles and maintaining the keywords themselves.

As well as the redevelopment work, I was tasked with implementing commercial takeovers. These happened on a weekly basis across various pages on the site. I implemented a timed system so that these could go up and come down automatically. The CSS (as well as any necessary javascript and html) was then produced and tested by the client before the takeover went live. Examples of takeover implementation are shown below.

Sugarscape

admin — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 17:42:30 +0000

As well as developing the ELLEuk.com site at Hachette Filipacchi, I also helped maintain and develop the Drupal based sugar magazine website called Sugarscape. This involved ensuring any bugs found on the site were dealt with in a timely manner and also new developments such as the Sugarscape games channel were completed. Other developments included the addition of user galleries and, as with ELLEuk.com, ensuring commerical takeovers went live on the site smoothly.

I was also the technical help on the Sugarscape webchats for the games channel, where celebrities such as Alesha Dixon, Miley Cyrus and The Veronicas had webchats with the site users. This involved ensuring that the webchats themselves went smoothly for both the celebrities and the site editors and also ensuring the webchat transcript was displayed as soon as possible after the end of the webchat.

Psychologies

admin — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 17:24:26 +0000

While I was developing websites for HF-UK, part of my initial brief was to bug fix on the hugely popular Psychologies website. This included style fixes and also ensuring the Flash based quizzes functioned correctly.