so the territory hub was worked on for the majority of my work week and i’ve spent an enormous amount of time debugging the “prettiness” factor of the whole thing. i’ve ran into several issues, rather interesting and complicating issues, and have solved them all. i will be saving those issues for the remaining 3 updates. for this update, i’d like to just show you some screenshots of the information architecture stage and some quick screens of my php include files, html code and css code.
i drew up and diagrammed the entire php/mysql process on paper beforehand. here i have my dinner holding it up while i take a quick shot of it. nothing too fancy. just a bunch of arrows to show the process of use. login, redirect to new page, input information, if that information is set, echo $PHP_SELF to run the php script + the javascript fade effect, post information to database via $mysql_query($query), redirect to updated page. just a simple diagram. i tend to do this for every dynamic project i do, it’s just a habit of mine to stay organized.
here is a screenshot of some of my css. again, like many other projects i do, the territory hub is a mixture of transparent PNGs and divs layered on top of each other using z-index. while this may not be efficient for IE6, i designed the page with that in mind. the only transparent png on top of each other is the logo up top which is all black anyway. all other PNGs are scattered throughout the whitespace. again, clean and structured CSS is very important to me, especially when debugging time comes around.
a quick screenshot of my html code. i’m trying to keep it as clean as possible. please keep in mind that the hub is a mashup of html, php, mysql, javascript and a little bit of mootools. i kept my javascript files external for easier calling within my coding. it also cleans up really nice and saves me time when i need to edit that javascript. tables were only used for my navigation. don’t hate.
here’s a screenshot of the files i’m including in my php. the final result now is about 3 files, my config, opendb and closedb. the other files are now hardcoded into each master file so i can just do a $PHP_SELF. i’m doing this as a hack/workaround to get my pretty factor working which i’ll explain in my next update.
if you want a sneak peek of the pretty factor i’m saving for the next update, you can check it out here. only “submit” will work. you should see a faded-in window, followed by a 4-second rest, followed by a redirect to an updated.php file which should post up an “updated database!” image that you can click off. IE6 users might encounter some issues.
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Your are Great. And so is your site! Awesome content. Good job guys! xanax