My Portfolio

This is my portfolio of my recent dev work. It's not terribly sexy, but hopefully it gets the point across. The sites seen here were completed in the last year, and were mainly built using the Joomla CMS, but some were built using OSCommerce, and ALL were built using some combination of either of the two platforms and generous helpings of my own custom code. Have a look and contact me once you're done, so I can do some work for you too!

Moving Boxes Ottawa - http://movingboxes.ca

movingboxes

This was a OSCommerce job requiring a migration of the existing website's functionality to a much newer version of OSCommerce. The job required careful testing and co-operation with the client to ensure that all existing functionality was preserved in the migration. I also developed a custom OSCommerce plugin to allow embedding the client's catalog on other websites using a simple javascript snippet.

Cracker Comedy Festival - http://crackercomedy.com

The Cracker site was a fairly plain Joomla 1.5 site to begin with which grew to include a few more interesting features. This was the first site I built using the Joomla "EventsList" component, and also the first site where I wrote custom Joomla code. While the site has now moved on to a new developer, most of my custom elements (custom views for the events and news components, as well as the custom display component for videos) remain on the site.

Other custom components include:

  • Display component for photo galleries, based on the standard Joomla WYSIWYG news entry control, and the wonderful Lightbox JS (http://www.huddletogether.com/projects/lightbox/) which made it easy for the end user to create a photo gallery simply by
    adding photos to an article, and changing the type to "gallery". This
    component is also still in use on the site.
  • Transparent menu display component, built on top of the normal Joomla menu class.

Axis Trading Company - http://axis-trading.com

Axis Trading was actually two sites in one - The first (the page seen above) was a new front-end implementation, built to use the existing custom CMS (written by the former developer). The second was a round of changes and fixes for the "wholesale" site, which was a custom install of OSCommerce, already set up by the former developer.

There are several examples of my custom work on the front page, including the scrolling control for the featured products, and the "What's New" scroller, both based on the excellent "fleXcroll" script (found at http://www.hesido.com/web.php?page=customscrollbar).

Most of the work I did on the wholesale side of the site was simple gui fixes, but there was also significant DHTML work, including an AJAX control to update prices based on a user's discount rate, which required me to learn more than I ever wanted to learn about the OSCommerce platform. It's safe to say that I consider myself to be an OSCommerce expert after having completed this project.

The Beauty Pot - http://thebeautypot.com

An OSCommerce site, The Beauty Pot was another site that I inherited from other developers. The front page, however, I completely built from the ground up, using elements of the OSCommerce platform mixed with my own custom code. I'm particularly proud of the "boxed" layout, and the cross-browser implementation of the transparent effect of the text overlays for the different areas of the site. Again, I learned a lot about the OSCommerce platform.

PWP Immigration - http://immigration.au.com

A relatively easy Joomla 1.5 site, compared to some of the other work I have done recently, PWP Immigration still has some interesting elements. Because of design requirements, I decided to use the SIFR library to implement some of the text elements, which required fonts not normally found on most web clients. I also custom wrote the news feeder on the front page, using the Joomla API to integrate it with the standard Joomla CMS.

Steam Sports Club - http://steamsports.org

Another relatively simple Joomla 1.5 site, I was able to re-use some of the code from the Cracker site, including the Video display component, and the photo gallery component (both of which, unfortunately, are only seen in the "Members" section of the site). This was a great site to quickly roll out and gave me a chance to try out some of the custom code I'd written on another site, thereby proving its long-term usefullness.

Smashlife! - http://smashclub.com.au/

Yet another quick Joomla 1.5 site. I was able to again re-use some of my custom components, including the transparent menu class and the video display class. I also used the fleXcroll code, again, to implement the ticker on the bottom of the page.