telophase | (no subject)

*phew*

I think I've got the design of the ConDFW 2008 website more-or-less finalized. It took many many hours of banging my head against the desk to accept that I just cannot sort WordPress posts - which is what I'm using to manage the individual guests' bio pages - by anything other than Title or Date. Which means that they're all sorted by the first name now.*

Anyway, plz to be telling me if it goes explodey on your screen - browser & OS would be a help to know. The GoH names near the top do break onto another line if your browser width isn't wide enough, but that's a typical hazard of the Web and not something I'm concerned about. I'm more worried about things that prevent people from getting information or give them misleading information. And I'm way too annoyed with Wordpress's sorting limitations to care about teeny tweaks at the moment. :D

* The con director approved that - she doesn't care as long as there's some sort of organization. If enough people complain, we can hack it to display in last-name order by changing the posting date/time on all of the posts and then sorting by date/time, but I'd rather not have to do that. :)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

It's all Wordpress, so the content is divorced from the design and is mostly controlled by CSS. :D I have no idea why I'm all of a sudden addicted to CMSes instead of doing it all myself - well, ok I know on this site it's because otherwise I get tired of people expecting me to update it. I wrote my own CMS that we used for 2 or 3 years, but it wasn't very robust, so I switched to Wordpress this year. I test-drove Drupal and Joomla, but they weren't able to keep an unpublished database of guest biographies, which is what we really needed. Or if they were able to, I couldn't figure it out. XD Wordpress isn't perfect in that regard, but I'm having it keep them all as post drafts, and when the guest confirms, we switch it from Draft to Published to make them automagically appear. :)

The boy has had an idea for a whole database system to run an entire con for like a decade now - if we ever get together and code it up, I'll probably be in charge of the GUI and doing things like this. XD

Our CMS is a load of poop-eating slime, so I'm sure anything you produced was better. (Actually, it's a load of code-eating slime, hence my ire ... I've put some layouts just the way I wanted them, and had it chew all my nice code to hell ... .) Honestly, we were better off when I was the CMS ... .

When we first started the agency's public website, we had cool Unix guru people working directly on the project, and we could do nifty things with DBs and such. Now most of the people involved are the usual run-of-the-mill Fed IT people, and just about anything is whoa! Too complicated! Has to run through the test lab! Has to be a COTS solution! Yada yada yada ... I miss being part of a can-do operation where people actually understand what they're working on.