Development

Cristian in Development, Gimmicklab, Hydroponic

March 12, 2010

Hydroponic 2010 and ECO

News on Hydroponic. I will be short, we are finishing different productions.

We are not from Brooklin.

Hydroponic 2010 Communication campaign.

Hydroponic 2010 Website resume.

Also we released a new corporate identity plus a car design.

ECO Corporate Identity blog post.

ECO project resume.

Go and read it at Gimmicklab.

Cristian in Development, Tweets

December 23, 2009

Expression Engined

We used to build our projects on top of CakePHP, but after playing with Code Igniter and Expression Engine we decided to give it a try in a commercial project.

The first one has been with Hydroponic, and after the experience we are totally delighted with the switch, and from now we will use the elasticity and power of Code Igniter and Expression Engine for almost every project.

At Gimmicklab we master custom PHP and MySQL, but we also like to take advantages using frameworks for custom development. After playing and building multiple sites using different platforms such as Cake, Wordpress, Expression Engine, Code Igniter, Ruby on rails, Joomla, Magento or Oscommerce here are our choices for web development.

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Cristian in Development

November 13, 2009

Zen Coding

Hace unas semanas descubrí The Art of Zen Coding, y desde entonces estoy totalmente entregado a esta nueva forma de escribir HTML y CSS.

Aplicando matemáticas para definir la estructura del HTML consigues escribir 50 lineas de código en 1, es una idea ganadora que ha cambiado la forma de escribir el código base de mis proyectos.

Se trata de un snippet para Textmate, también disponbible para Aptana, que incrementa de forma sorprendente la velocidad a la que escribes lí­neas de código..

Mejor con algunos ejemplos:

ul#menu.navigation>li*5>a

Pulsando CMD+E, generará el siguiente código HTML:

<ul id="navigation" class="main">
	<li><a href=""></a></li>
	<li><a href=""></a></li>
	<li><a href=""></a></li>
	<li><a href=""></a></li>
	<li><a href=""></a></li>
</ul>

Y usando el tabulador podemos empezar a rellenar el contenido del atributo href y el texto del enlace.

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Cristian in CSS, Development

March 13, 2009

Stop pixel perfection for Internet Explorer 6

At our main site we are not IE6 friendly so if you try to access you will get an explanation page and different links to upgrade your browser. Since it’s our site we can decide whatever we like, and here we had chosen a radical approach blocking page views trying to educate our clients convincing them for an upgrade.

For our clients site we take a different approach. The site should run and performance as it’s supposed to but we stopped spending hours and hours trying to force IE6 to style the page correctly. No more pixel perfection for Internet Explorer, no spending 10% of project time fixing IE6 bugs, not anymore.

From now we are going to put a conditional comments for IE6 inviting them to upgrade. They still will get the content and maybe they won’t enjoy a perfectly aligned layout, or see a column rarely padded… anyway if they are using this browser it’s because they don’t care and if they don’t care they don’t even realize a CSS bug.

Here it is the snippet that we will use to show a upgrade notice. It’s a conditional comment that will apply to IE6 users and some CSS to style it:

<!--[if IE 6]>
	<div id="ie6">
        <p>Upgrade notice and link to suggested browsers here</p>
        </div>
<![endif]-->

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Cristian in Development, Wordpress

January 29, 2009

Wordpress and OSCommerce

Last weeks I’ve been working in a project that requires a deep integration between Wordpress and OSCommerce.

I never had been using OSCommerce but I was absolutely disappointed about the table based layout and the HTML and CSS estructure because it looks old.

I ended up at WP.Osc where they developed a really nice job integrating Wordpress and OSCommerce, supporting even theme integration. The bad side is that I don’t like the final XHTML structure even though it’s a table less layout so I started rebuilding all the mark up in taking more consideration at semantics.

Since different people had been asking me all I can say is that I will make public this contribution in the next weeks cause right now it’s not completely finished.

So I will let you all know when we release the project that I’m working on and I can take time to polish different things to make this contribution available.

UPDATE: Check Magento and their wordpress extension for a clean e-commerce+wordpress environment. I’m stopping working on the oscommerce+wordpress with valid XHTML integration and changing to Magento e-commerce system. Also the Wordpress Ecommerce plugin will fit all your needs as Oscommerce would do.