Finally I managed to get my new homepage ready. I have been working on building the logic I needed since spring, but with the ironman season and my involvement of the new homepage for Norseman Xtreme triathlon I got a little delay.

The process of building my new homepage

In this project I had a pretty good picture of how the site should look and what kind of functionality I would like to have.

The CakePHP logic

On earlier CakePHP project I have used the build in “Pages” for static content, but this time I wanted to make this part dynamic. I also wanted to show off my design work in a Portfolio part and not only rely on blog posts as core content. In the new site I actually have no regular app models, everything is build in CakePHP plugins. Totally I use these plugins:

• authake – user access and login for admin
• extend – holds all components, behaviors and helpers I use
• images – images for posts or nodes
• nodes – dynamic pages that support tree structure for the pages
• portfolios – portfolio and categories for this
• posts – blog posts and categories for this
• settings – imports settings in config/core.php and override this with settings stored in the database

The design

In a separate process I have worked on the design, by sketches in Adobe Illustrator. Graphics is exported to Photoshop, when I started the xhtml/css process. When I’m in the design process I use CSS galleries and PatternTap for inspiration and solutions for specific design problems.

Content creation

For the posts I only had to import them into the new database table. For the portfolio I have collected screenshots of the different designs I have made, and I worked localhost creating this content. For the pages most already existed, but needed to be updated.

Deploying

Changed my hosting last year to have support for Subversion, and deploying with svn is piece of cake. I made a sub domain where I first deployed the new site, when I was happy I only had to rename the directories.

Picture of the new portfolio sections. Check it out on gersh.no/portfolios