A Beta home page: part 2, how scripting makes it better
We in the middle of a three part series on some of the technology used on the beta version of the new UW home page. In this part I will over how scripting, both server side and client side, come together to make site production and maintenance better. This is all non-techie… and there is a sneak peak at the end.
Client side
This basically is the sIFR and the nifty corners mentioned in part 1. If you have visited their perspective web sites you have some idea of what they do. One is basically a javascript function that parses flash text, trick the browser, and allows the web developer to offer up fonts that people don’t have on their computer.
The second just tells the browser to use a bunch of CSS classes that result in a nice rounded corner on a box. This saves the developer/designer from putting in a lot of tags to achieve the same effect.
Of course there is also the CSS files but we will talk about those in Part 3.
Server side
All the pages are PHP or forced to behave like PHP with .htaccess. This is so two main features work properly: the ‘Graphics made’ PHP search and the PHP includes.
I think that deserves a good diagram so hold on in regards to that. Basically there are four includes: header, right nav, and footer. There is also one that calls in the nifty javascript. These are all set up so I don’t have to update the Dreameaver template to update those parts of the site. The only things I have to update the .dwt file for are left navigation changes (and I don’t plan on making too many) and include changes. Oh and CSS calls, lets not forget about those.
The PHP includes have a huge advantage for me over your typical SSI’s – I can use them across servers and domains. CPA has files scattered over several domains and servers. Some are official UW pages, some are just CPA related, some are ‘other’ but over the years they have been scattered. But we are talking pages that have had the same file names for 13 years in a couple cases. I am not moving them 
The search is probably the heaviest server side script with this page but that is not saying much, for now it just pulls the google results so they appear locally. In the future we would like to build on that script and have tabs that allow you to initiate the same search but in a different domain just with one click. No typing. Look for that in the final version 5.0.
In the next part I will go over some of the major CSS changes and layout tweaks. Maybe even have textpattern here include some images… Ok for now, take a look a screen shot of the new and old UW home page side by side. Smart folks will find the Beta page from there.
