The Forest of Avon is one of 12 Community Forests in England and is part of the National Community Forest Partnership. The Forest of Avon staff had been using an Access database to manage their contacts and mailing lists. This wasn’t entirely suitable for the purpose as it wasn’t suited to being used by several people at once and needed some modification. I suggested that they moved to a browser based solution written in ASP and Access to take advantage of their existing IIS server and database.
The solution I built for them allows all the staff to search and update the database via their web browser. Each user has an individual login and can create saved contact lists from the results of an advanced search. These contact lists can be downloaded as Excel spreadsheets for use in mail merges. Lists can be combined, copied and refined.
As this was a bespoke build, I built in a number of other features in such as a document management system, so that files used within the organisation can be stored centrally on the server and accessed via the intranet, to avoid multiple copies of documents floating around as email attachments or on network drives.
skills and technologies used:-
- Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP classic)
- Access
- XHTML
- CSS
what’s this? i’m actually blogging again after a break of about six months – new site, new URL and everything. I’m not going to explain everything in this post, i’ll save that for when I “offcially” launch rickhurst.co.uk
no i’m blogging today because I decided to drop in at caffe gusto up at the top of park street on my way to work to have a coffee and use the free wifi. goddam it’s hot, but with the latin music and sounds of the cafe and non-english accents downstairs it seems about right, for a minute here I could be in spain somewhere, rather than just round the corner from work where I shall shortly go and ascend our many, many stairs and stand in front of the fan sweating for a while!
The European Law Firm website is a platform for a network of commercially orientated law firms across Europe. The site also has a members extranet where members can communicate and share documents and other information via a secure login. The public website and extranet are based on a bespoke Content Management System (CMS) written in php and MySQL.
I was asked to repurpose an existing database and CMS to create a new website and CMS. I enlisted the design skills of Fanatic Design to create the visual design of both the public facing website and client extranet and created these as XHTML and CSS templates. I then refined and extended the existing CMS to add the new functionality required by the project. Most of the information on the website is maintained by members of the network and the site Administrator, through the web using simple forms. Some of the content on the site is set up to use Macromedia Contribute templates.
skills and technoligies used:-
DFR skate zine is a collaborative online skateboard magazine based in Bristol, UK. It is based on the Plone Content Management System, which allows non-technical users to contribute articles, photographs and video to be published on the site. The site also displays content from other websites by making use of incoming RSS feeds. The visual design for the site was provided by Iain Claridge.
skills and technologies used:-
- XHTML
- CSS
- Javascript (including use of Lightbox library)
- Plone skinning and content types (Archetypes)
