I was in search for an open source CMS to power my existing HTML websites, my search is now over.
About a month ago I spend countless hours searching for an open source content management system that would work with my own HTML and CSS designs. I’ve grown tired of trawling through the WordPress galleries to find something that looks similar to what I wanted, and being unable to find the de-facto tutorial on how to merge WordPress or Drupal with my own work.
My search really opened my eyes to the variety available but few would allow me “embed” their dynamic features within my static design.
There are some fantastic lightweight solutions out there, like Perch and Simple Content Management System by PHP Jabbers. Ideally though, I wanted something that would allow me to make templates of my site, and allow my clients to create new pages by her or himself.
Then I found Textpattern ( textpattern.com ), I had never heard of it before and was surprised to read that it has been going for as long as WordPress. I must admit the initial skim read of the website and terminology made it seem a tad complex for my liking, but the feature list really did tick all my boxes. So I bit the bullet, found a few beginners tutorials (see below) and made a start. It wasn’t long after delving deeper that I realised this CMS really is a web designers best kept secret.
Excited at the prospect of finally being able to create a content managed website from my own Dreamweaver exports, I bought the book Textpattern Solutions. Now trust me, the book is quite thick, but a large proportion of the back is a reference index, and a large proportion of the beginning is discussing various methods of installation on different platforms. Having read the meat of this book, I can confidently tell you that it will teach you everything about this CMS, and yes, you will be able to create blogs, galleries, contact forms and huge sites with the knowledge oozing from its pages.
Textpettern Solutions book - friends of ED
The book is well written, it doesn’t loose you, and greatly explains the terminology of Textpattern.
The Textpattern terminology is basically the areas which Textpattern will divide your HTML into. there are articles, which become the written content of your site. Then there are sections, think of these as your main navigation, “Home” “About us” and “Gallery” would all be good examples of sections. Pages are the bare bones HTML layout of your site and Forms ( “form” in the sense of a shape and not a contact form) are snippets of code which govern how the articles are displayed.
This system probably sounds a little confusing looking from the outside-in, but trust a person with little scripting experience, it becomes apparent after a few tutorials just how flexible and powerful this system is, enabling you to build dynamic functionality within your HTML.
A month ago I was in your position, reading about Textpattern on someone’s blog, and here I am, about to wrap up a content managed website I made from scratch. yes there were one or two head scratches along the way (or three in my case!), but it looks great and works like a charm. I’m here to tell any designer who is looking for a similar solution, who takes pride in creating a site from scratch, that Textpattern will grant you the power you seek. I really want to spread the word about this fantastic product. Thank you for reading and please give Textpattern a shot!
Remember the Milk ( www.rememberthemilk.com ) is a free, online to-do list. So, if like me you struggle to deal with having just one brain, Remember the Milk is there to capture the ideas and thoughts which would otherwise fly out the other ear.
A lot of people compare Remember the Milk to meatier application such as Evernote, the crucial difference however is that RTM allows you to sync your “List” with other members, but remain on the free account. My research has struggled to find such a feature without having to pay and as such makes RTM very desirable with teams working on a project, or even a business.
Having used RTM both individually and as a team I have had a few feature ideas pop into my head which I would like to announce to the world:
Images below are badly edited screen-grabs of the RTM interface, made purely to illustrate my feature requests.
1. More colour options
Please Sir, can we have some more ?
I could arrange my list into priority which appears to be the default colour spectrum in RTM. However I would also like a colour palette which could arrange my list in terms of category (r,o,y,g,b,i,p) or even price/profit using a traffic light system. I would certainly like to see green, amber and red added in the future, or even the ability to add labels to the colours and create my own colour key.
2. Visible notes
The lazy man's note making
With RTM you can add notes to your list entries, and to be fair they are easily accessible. because I’m lazy, and generally find the more useful programs to be the ones I need to spend less time on, I would like notes to be visible under their associated list entry (or perhaps a fly-out tab?). If I have my browser window open in order to keep a check on RTM, I’d like to merely glance at the screen in order to read the notes. Also if I’m synchronizing a list with other members, any new note I add will be much more apparent then relying on them to notice the notepad icon on the right hand side of the list name. Yes, I am lazy.
3. List Note of the Day
Note of the day
Another feature to benefit teams here would be to add an editable paragraph at the top of each list. When different team/department members log on and synchronize they’ll be able to see what’s cooking with the other departments. It would serve as a general piece of scrap paper.
So there we have it. In short, Remember the Milk is a service you can’t argue with, but adding a few extra bits and bobs might make it more team-friendly.
I thought I would showcase two samples of work from my current project. Over recent months I have been working on an illustrated book which advertises a fictional, evil corporation named “Wehtam Corp”.
The first image below is called “The Great Hall”. The 3D room was created in Cinema 4D, textures were created in Photoshop and Genetica Pro, final colour adjustments were later performed in Photoshop. (Click image to enlarge)
The Great Hall
The final Image is called “Neon Battle Suits”. Going for a dated videogame look, the pixelated characters were created in Photoshop and applied to a 2D plane in Cinema 4D, again the image returned to Photoshop for final colour adjustments. (Click image to enlarge)
Neon Battle Suits
The Completed images are a meaty 5171 x 2621 pixels, I hope you like them!
In order to prevent the CreativeFail blog from becoming Minecraft dominated, I have created a simple website to display news and highlights from the CubeCraft server.
At a glance the website will tell you the whitelist status and any other important server event.
All future updates will be added to the CubeCraft website (www.cubecraft.creativefail.com) so be sure to check on it if you have difficulty logging on.
As you may be aware, the recent Minecraft update has been causing our server a few issues. While we work to resolve some of the problems we have set up a temporary whitelist to monitor traffic.
You DO NOT need to register an account here to be added to the whitelist
If you currently have a structure on the CubeCraft server, please add a comment below to this blog post. You need to specify your Minecraft username in your comment.
We may not add all requests as this is only a temporary procedure while we resolve these issues. We aim to open the doors to everyone again as soon as possible. It may help your cause if you can accurately describe your building or get another player to vouch for you.
Over recent months I’ve noticed a trending hostility toward Flash, this was fuelled by the Apple vs Adobe debate and the absence of Flash on the Apple iPad. I have read many interesting blog entries which cover a similar theme of “Flash must die”and while I don’t necessarily agree I do find a lot of the arguments based on actual experience and as such make very interesting reads.
I certainly believe that Flash has, and indeed, does have a place on the internet, remaining a popular tool in the designer’s arsenal. Before you travel down to the comments section and curse my mother though, allow me to give my own experiences on Flash.
Clients love Flash. The instant you show them how their website can have moving, interactive animation their eyes widen and so does my wallet. I often get clients specifically ask for Flash and it’s a wonderful feeling to offer a bespoke interactive element as a designer and not a developer.
When ActionScript 3 came along it made me realise how much I miss simple “onClick()” driven animations, as a designer who needs to produce quick results I would always favour getting visuals down before writing a block of code. With the introduction of Flash in InDesign and the new Flash Catalyst I feel that power has once again been restored to the designer, giving us the opportunity to prototype our creative ideas without the care for scripting.
A popular argument I hear is that “Flash crashes my system” or “it’s written badly”. While this may be true, I believe the blame for these comments lay on the shoulders of individual developers. I often hear about PHP based websites being compromised due to some cross site scripting attack which the developers overlooked. It’s no fault of PHP however, it’s a wonderful language.
I would also like to add that, to my knowledge, I’ve not knowingly had to blame Flash for a computer crash. Recently however, my Mac was brought to its knees while rendering a HTML5 canvas experiment.
As a designer though, you have to move with the times and so last week a bought a book on HTML5, as interesting as the book was it did illustrate how far away we are from a global adoption of this new version. Not even the latest browsers support all the new features, and we all know how bothered people are at getting the latest version of Internet Explorer! Are we also to expect a wide difference in output from each of the browsers ?
HTML5 is shaping up to be a great thing, but I wouldn’t disregard Flash any time soon. If there is one business that’s persistent at keeping up with design trends, it’s Adobe.
We’ve experienced forest fires, sabotage, thieving… the works (horay!). But that’s what makes it interesting! CubeCraft, our Minecraft server, has been steadily growing in popularity. We have some regulars who have been busy building some very impressive structures, many of the buildings are loud and proud while others are hidden within the mountain side or buried under the ocean floor.
There’s only one building we’re missing, and that’s yours! Fire up Minecraft and show us what creative structures you can build!
Alas it seems we can’t get enough of this fun, creative offering by Mojang Specifications and we’re certainly not alone! Creative Fail readers are the first to be invited to the Block and Load server, which is currently hosting a vanilla (no mods) version of Minecraft. To welcome newcomers we have disabled the Whitelist, thus letting the world and his wife through the door. We have also enabled PvP (player versus player) on the server to spice things up. We invite you to join us and spend your first virtual night in a muddy cave with a mere twig as your only weapon against the hordes of spiders and exploding Creepers.
To whet your appetites (or to put you off completely), we have provided you with some screenshots of the initial structure which was built by myself and Pilkerman, the other administrator.
The largest of the two castles - near the spawn point
The "Gallery" building, also visible from the initial spawn area
My Minecraft avatar - The simple texture was created in Photoshop
Since I first fired up the Duke Nukem 3D level editor, I’ve had a hobbyist interest in level design for video games, this then spawned into character design and even making mods.
As the visuals and mechanics of these customisable games increases in size and complexity, the idea of creating your own assets becomes less appealing, suddenly I can’t afford to spend the time mastering how the scripting interface integrates with the 3D material editor.
Then Minecraft comes along and hits the reset button. A game which reintroduces the art of custom content creation to the masses. With its simple, cube-like characters and easily editable “skins”, Minecraft allows you to fashion your own pixelated character and easily upload your designs for all to see and share.
This has birthed a huge library of user created skins, ranging from comic book heroes to historical figure. Above you’ll see my avatar. I created the texture in Photoshop and exported as a PNG file, within seconds I was showing him to the world online. Good show Minecraft.
On the run up to Christmas, Call of Duty: Black Ops sales figures surpassed the $1 billion worldwide milestone. In short, the game is about as hot as molten lava. Hundreds of thousands of gamers are regularly online, fragging away to the latest offering of this successful franchise.
Upon opening my copy of Call of Duty: Black Ops, I was instantly met with disappointment. The instruction manual… it was HORRIBLE! I understand that the video game manual as an art form has crumbled over recent years, but still! I fondly remember such manuals as Metal Gear Solid, filled with wonderful illustrations and articles. Why is this though? Games have become so much more visual and intelligent, don’t they deserve some physical material?
Remember the Milk ( 
