Screenshots!

Home page

Screenshot time! As you can see, the information is not filled in, but the skeleton of the website is now complete! The home page contains Header menu, header image, search bar, multiple widgets along the footer and an eventual greeting

Functional Slide down sub-menu

Easy to get to Login/Register page

Beginning of the Forum

At the moment the only slide down is the Breeds menu, sliding down into types of poultry categories. However I'm inclined to think that it functions well, is attractive, and is easier on the reader who is looking for information.





Next is the easy to get to/understand login screen with a register link and forgot your password link below. This immediately send you an e-mail with your new password, and can be changed as desired.






Now the forum! With just an introduction forum at the moment it looks plain but you can see the potential, one of my next goals will be to see if it is possible to make the forum stretch across the whole entire page rather than have blog post size confinements.

                                                             And finally User Profiles. In subjects in the forum, it is possible to click a users username or avatar, which brings you to this page where you can what topics they have created, their replies in various topics as well as their favorite topics and their subscriptions.

Its a Green Christmas!

When I brought my computer home for christmas I had to completely wipe the www file because for some unknown reason It was totally flipping out and now working. So another new skill was learned, where the delete button is (took me forever to figure out that It was the 'Move to Trash' button) and how to go into MySQL and re-create a database, which after a Google search or two, didn't take too long, I was pleasantly surprised. So an installation of Wordpress later I was faced with the daunting task of picking a theme, and lets just say my finickiness, it was the longest process.

After searching for hours, and yes really, hours; I ended up picking last years default theme. Then I spent 6 hours trying to edit a driver to make it work with Linux instead of Windows, but thats another story (It's still a work in progress, almost have it done though) After that It was plugin installs, which involved downloading .zip files, extracting them into the var/www/wp-content/plugin file, and then activating them in the localhost, and in the end I downloaded BBPress, a basic customizable forum, and Nice Login Widget, a login widget that allows you to put a shortcode (In that particular case [sp_login_shortcode]) which you just put in the text area and its a link to the widget without having to technically clicking on it.

Although I may make this sound like I didn't have any issues, that is not the case, I have issues with this stupid thing all the time, but apparently the more you struggle, the better you learn, I better suddenly be a genius soon because I've had my fair share of struggles with this project, I've started over from scratch multiple times because I screwed it up so badly. I just Don't write them down in detail because its slightly boring and I'm not sure of the technical names of that was wrong, an example would be just before I was writing this, I changed the permalinks in Wordpress to a custom setting, and when I kept on getting 404 errors, It took forever to figure out what was wrong (putting it back to the default permalink fixed it, lesson: Don't touch default settings that you don't know anything about.)

*Checks the spelling a million times over but still probably sounds like gibberish* Well I think that's it for the moment, now it's just filling in the information and putting the icing on the cake (Just kidding, I hate icing, more like whipped cream on Pumpkin pie) 

Woot! I remembered

Well, I luckily remembered to ask Perry about my CMS problem, and another CMS (Wordpress) with a forum it is!

Of course I was considering this CMS early on in the course, but didn't pick it, so it obviously had to be the easiest thing in the world to install. Download, install, extract the file in the /var/www folder and follow a couple instructions that babied you through the steps (Although I'll admit I had to ask someone how to create a new directory on Debian) So all went well! 

My website is up and fine, now all I need is the forum plug in! And to get this I need a FTP server on my computer. The last part of class I tried this, and couldn't get this to work, so I gave up. But as I'm re-reading the instructions now when I'm not rushing through it, I realized I screwed up in a couple places, so tomorrow is now hopefully the day that FTP shall work! I'm crossing my fingers. 

Back to the Bloody Drawing Board!

Well. Things aren't working exactly as planned. My current CMS is working fine as I add pages to my website. Err, well, almost working I should say. Because I am an over achiever, I was wanting to attach a forum to my website for people with the same crazy gene (Its a rare homozygous recessive gene found in the 11th chromosome if you'd like to know, scientifically called crazy-avine-ladyus) too meet and talk and all that fun stuff.
Buttt because life sucks, I for the life of me cannot figure out how to add a forum to my website. So now its asking the teacher time, will having an AMAZING website make up for my lack of a forum? Or is it better to chance installing a new CMS with lots of support and easy to set up add-ons, possibly not having the website be up to my standards, but having a forum? -Sigh- Decisions, decisions. I shall update this tomorrow with the path that I will take! (If I remember to ask him anyway, I have an awful memory)

Have a lovely day/night all you people who are reading a crazy 16 year old's engineering cumulative blog! (There seems to be a lot of you reading this thing for some reason, not that I'm complaining!)