Wowza, A New Website – Part II

Hi, I’m Sean, the website guy here at Salsaddiction and this is the second in a series of blogs about the new website.  In the first blog, I talked a bit about WordPress, the carousel and now plan to introduce the sliding drop down.

This is where a lot of interaction with the website will happen and includes:

 

  • (A) Logging into your account or (B) registering
  • (C) Checking your newsletter subscription
  • (D) Sending any of our instructors an email
  • (E) Checking your orders
  • (F) Updating your address
  • (G) Searching the website

 

And here’s a little secret – if you click anywhere on the background of the drop-down it will scroll back up!

The amount of technology that goes into making the drop down is quite amazing, all of it pretty much open source and free:

  • First, jQuery, that awesome javascript library is used everywhere, from sliding the panel down, to the secret click on the background to make it scroll back up, and is used heavily by the code that support the rest of the goodness below.
  • The sliding panel was original created by WebKreations but then converted into a WordPress pluginand then heavily customized to use a bunch of other plugins like:
    • FS Contact Form for the contact form.
    • Woocommerce for the shopping cart solution and customer management (more in a later post)
    • WP Mailman, again, heavily modified for our own use and it takes care of the subscribe and unsubscribes and integrates with the Mailman mailer.  (More in a later blog post)
  • And lastly, Tooltipsy which is used for all the helpful tooltips found around the site.

 

It is pretty crazy how much javascript gets loaded in the background.

Cheers, Sean

Send me an Email

 

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Wowza, a New Website!

Welcome to our new website!  As the resident website technical guy, I plan to introduce a few of the new features of the website in a series of blog posts over the next few weeks.

One of the first things you will notice is the sweet transparent design done by that genius graphic designer on the east coast, Kyle Smith.  With a striking background image and floating text, it really makes the content stand out.

A big element on the front page is the carousel where you can find graphics introducing all the latest events that will be taking place, and you can even click on them.  One of the things we want to do is give the user more control, and the carousel includes a stop/start button and tabs to click between the scrolling images.

For those technical minded people, the entire website is built with WordPress and about ten core plugins, two of which are heavily customized.  In our previous incarnation of the website, it used three backend scripts, TYPO3 for content management, WordPress for this blog and Magento for the shopping cart.  The result was that it created three different interfaces for clients, and here are screen shots of two of them:

Using multiple programs like TYPO3, WordPress and Magento was a hassle because menus had to be copied between them.  As the website administrator,  I had been using all three for over a year and it added a lot of unnecessary work and presented a crappy interface to the user.  To keep the menus synced, it was necessary to take the menu generated by TYPO3 and copying all those changes into both the blog and shopping cart designs manually. With everything in WordPress, it handles menu generation all in one place.

In the next blog, I will write about the drop down everyone now has available at the top of their page:

Until next time, cheers,

Sean Donovan

Send me an Email
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