Evaluation
As this assignment draws to a close, it seems more like a beginning than an ending! The flexibility and relative ease with which Expression Engine is able to generate content is starting to hit home. This week, I have been working on a page that generates all its content from RSS feeds, inside a tabbed interface, courtesy of flowplayer.org.
It has not been without its issues, but I have successfully created the page which pulls its content from RSS feeds (view page) – which means I now have a template which can be re-purposed in any number of ways.
Also, the way that I have used Flash to communicate with Expression Engine shows that there is a wide scope for deploying it as a CMS.
In my day job we have been looking at CMS systems for various projects, deploying Drupal and Silver Stripe on different occasions. None of them, however, have the flexibility and usability of Expression Engine, so what I have learned so far is invaluable for future work.
This module has been excellent, I have enjoyed every bit of it (including the blogging bit – and I thought I didn’t like blogs, but now realise there is a certain value to being able to record your thoughts!), and I look forward to developing further projects using the knowledge that I have gained from it…
As a highlight I am especially pleased with the Earth Monkey page for the following reasons:
- It demonstrates that it is relatively straightforward to pull media files and information in from external sources
- I used some CSS3 properties for the first time and I am liking their effect
The term “progressive development” is an apt way to describe deploying CSS3 statements – at the moment they won’t work across all browsers, but they degrade nicely in the ones that can’t render CSS3 and they look great in those that do. Web design is a constantly evolving thing and it is good to feel that I may have a handle on at least some of it!!!
You can read more about my evaluation and development of this project, including references at:
www.hand-crafted-media.co.uk/awd/bensmusic/index.php/main-site/About
Until next time… 🙂
