Programming with the Code Blacks
19 June 2010 | admin | 0 Comments
- Hey, well thanks Sam for joining us, dragging us away from your computer.
That’s okay, I’m sure I can spare a few minutes.
- Fantastic. So tell us about the platform you’ve selected for your client for the website.
Ok well I’m running on SilverStripe, on MySQL database. The reason I’m choosing SilverStripe is that I’m the main guy who wrote it so it was a natural choice. But more than that, it’s very flexible , it’s easy to quickly tailor quite a rich CMS to the needs of a custom site, so when we turned up to the competition we didn’t really know what would be required and now that we’ve talked to the client we have an idea of what kind of features would be necessary, and it’s reasonably straightforward to tailor both the fields in the content model for the site as well as building custom forms and interactions and things quite quickly. So it makes SilverStripe a good choice for this kind of project.
- So I understand also that it’s multi-lingual as well which is an extra challenge.
One of the interesting challenges with multilingual is that every site, when they say they want to be multilingual is slightly different and finding the right balance of tailoring the content to the language but also presenting it in the right way and not overwhelming the translators with content. So, for instance, it’s more important to translate the navigation than it is every single page. And making sure that the content management system supports that well and in particular it’s probably the part that is going to be changed the most at the last minute. And so ensuring that we have a CMS that we can make those last minute changes without having to go back to the design is going to be really important.
And in terms of progress, how do you guys think you are going at the moment compared to where you thought you might have been at this stage?
I feel, like I’m comfortable with the progress that I’m making. I do feel that for like the midnight – 6am are probably going to be the toughest time for me personally and so for Mike because we are towards the end of the pipeline, we are making progress on the design, however I do think that our initial plans were to have things finished more quickly. But I’m still confident that we are going to be able to deliver and frankly, the more time going into the design is time well spent. I mean time I’m finding things to do building some of the underlying functionality but, also recognizing that there is going to be a lot of re-work once we know how it’s going to look. So yeah, mostly I’m pretty confident with the progress we’re making and looking forward to the hours ahead.
- And what’s been the biggest challenge?
Well the most recent challenge has been the servers have been going up and down a bit. Luckily we had set things up so we could work without a server relatively effectively. We can do work disconnected so it hasn’t been too much of a problem. Probably the other challenge has been…Usually in an environment like this, the different disciplines are user experience and design and information architecture. They would get time to sit down and think about these things, sleep on them, put together, document them in a nice way then hand off to the next person. We don’t have time to do that kind of stuff, we really need to be feeding from one person to the next. So, theres nothing really like formal documentation. It gets as formal as sketches on white boards and bits of paper which we can work with but that does make it a bit unusual, you are forced to go over things that other people have been looking at as well to make sure that you really have got everything because you’re not going to get everything specked out in a nice document. I guess it pushes out the Agile concept as far as you can. But overall it’s been an exciting challenge, as opposed to a frustrating one.
- Fantastic. Well, all the best for the upcoming hours and we will catch up with you in the morning.
Cheers.
Tags: Code Blacks, fcp10, programming
