Two projects have gone live to the pub­lic this week.  Let’s break them down shall we?

Rocket Kapre

Rocket Kapre is a web­site ded­i­cated to  fan­tas­tic Filipino fic­tion.  I was approached by the client Paolo Chikiamco a cou­ple of months ago with a tight time­line.  We started with a pre-built theme and worked our way from there, cus­tomiz­ing as nec­es­sary (and cus­tomize we did).  I mod­i­fied the slider and many other lay­out aspects sig­nif­i­cantly.  I also rolled out quite a bit of cus­tom tem­plate work using the Flutter CMS tool.  Any place where I wanted to add new con­tent areas to be filled out, cus­tom images, etc, I used Flutter to do that.  We have cus­tom write pan­els for the Books and the Authors entries for exam­ple.  I learned a lot about build­ing a theme set­ting page by work­ing with this theme as well.  Also, I really became a fan of the AZIndex plu­gin based on the work on this site, and have used it twice since on other sites.   I owe those guys a donation.

Fantasy Magazine

Recently, I was brought on board as the reg­u­lar web guy to imple­ment a bunch of changes over at Fantasy.   I look for­ward to work­ing with edi­tor Cat Rambo on improv­ing things through­out the year.  Our imme­di­ate goal was to redesign the exist­ing theme in a way that unclut­tered the home page con­sid­er­ably and added room for some adver­tis­ing.  I devel­oped the fea­tured con­tent slider and I built on the tabbed inter­face from the last site design by adding some accor­dion work as well.  Anywhere I could open up con­tent to the edi­tors, I did so using cus­tom page calls and the like.  For instance, the mast­head infor­ma­tion on the About tab is a page that can be edited and mod­i­fied on the back end now.   In gen­eral, I did a lot of code base clean­ing up for my own under­stand­ing.  There are a cou­ple of cus­tom plu­g­ins at work on the site thanks to Matt Kressel that proved very use­ful.    Coming up will be a much more com­plex user sys­tem allow­ing user pro­files with all kinds of fun cus­tom fields. I just need to get the box upgraded to PHP 5 for that work.  Some cool fea­tures com­ing down the pipe there.

So those are just a cou­ple of the projects I’ve been putting the fin­ish­ing touches on lately.  I’ve mostly fin­ished up at least one other site that won’t launch for quite a while.  And I’ve got a cou­ple new ones to get to work on, and some sub­con­tract­ing work lin­ing up as well.

Clockpunk Studios is doing pretty good these days!  Turns out that mas­ter­ing the WordPress tem­plate sys­tem has been a good career move.