services
Web Development & Design
A full-service agency, Engaging.net delivers web sites and systems that work.
Designer & Developer Support
When other web suppliers tap us it’s usually for our ExpressionEngine chops.
Recently
A revamp and redesign for Antidote Europe
The site now features nation-based language selection and a campaign-based layout.
Progress at the Israel Center for Social & Economic Progress
The ICSEP redesign relies on “Goldens”, a CSS grid framework for the golden ratio.
Take Control Books, now with account management
Both the site editor and the 48,000+ userbase get a plethora of AJAXy features.
Come springtime, southeast England’s countryside is powered by ExpressionEngine
Countryside 2010 showcases hundreds of outdoor events and activities.
Get saltEE: salt-co.com retrofitted with ExpressionEngine
The EE-powered site needed to look just as it did when updated manually.
Extend ExpressionEngine’s reach with External Entries v2
Update, select from and insert into any MySQL database directly from an EE template.
Get more next/previous power in ExpressionEngine with Nearby Entries
Amplify the power of ExpressionEngine’s next/previous entries.
Introducing Tied Entries, a new dimension for ExpressionEngine sites
Traverse a site’s various weblogs via their relationship fields.
products
External SAEF (Free)
Insert a row into any MySQL database table using a form on an ExpressionEngine page.
Tied Entries ($20)
An ExpressionEngine plugin to access content entries further than a single relationship away.
Elsewhere
After Steve Jobs’ resignation, the Daringfireball round-up of anecdotes:
“Nation on the Move” is the magnificent second episode of the America Revealed PBS series. Interestingly, the show is British-made.
Photos by Paul Ringstrom of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Muirhead Farmhouse which I had not heard of until this moment. I just love it. Beautiful brickwork that seems to be just the same as unbeautiful brickwork. Perfect shapes. The slightly outcropping wooden ziggurat on top. Oooh. Also the Sims House.
The Guardian’s Battle for the Internet feature, including Tim Berners-Lee’s warning about walled gardens. BTW, if you’re reading this on Facebook, I don’t write these Train entries on Facebook, but on my own site at http://adamkhan.net, and a nice Facebook app called RSS Graffiti sends them over.
Paul Graham PyCon US 2012 keynote
wherein he spells out some of the big ambitious start-up ideas on our collective mind. Be the next Google. Fix email. Be the next Apple. Replace universities. Ongoing diagnostic healthcare.
On the rise of the ebook and how it’s just another step in the increasing convenience of distributing a written work, just as books typeset on paper are.
“We don’t have castles and noble titles, so how do you indicate you’re part of the elite?” Wicked piece on TED by Benjamin Wallace.
Taking his time, Morozov asks the right questions about Steve Jobs, comparing him first to the Bauhaus movement, then to Henry Ford. Many quotable quotes, and good comments, especially the long one from JakeH at 02/27/2012 – 7:46pm EDT.
articles
Single-template ExpressionEngine site for Websiteforall
The creative agency’s new portfolio site takes the visitor immediately to the heart of matters.
How Subtraction.com was converted to EE
As a standard-bearer of design excellence everything at Khoi Vinh’s web site has to be just so.
Processes
Architecture
Before building your site or system, plans are required for both the back and front ends.
Installation & configuration
As well as smarts, what really makes a successful implementation likely is experience.
Coding
Turn screen mock-ups into web pages, web pages into dynamic screens.
O
nce we’ve populated the system with content data and produced the screen mock-ups, it’s time to knit these together and build something that the world can actually view and use.
Following the industry-standard Model/View/Controller pattern, we’ve already produced the Model with the architecture and configuration, so next up is to produce the View. To do this we convert the screen mock-ups to web pages using HTML for the document structure, CSS for the visual design, and JavaScript (increasingly relying on the jQuery framework and jQuery plug-ins) for the interface behavior.
After producing the View we move on to the Controller. In the case of ExpressionEngine, this means converting the HTML/CSS/JS web pages into dynamic templates, where the variable areas of each template are swapped out with dynamic data by the content management system.
The reason we begin coding only after completing the design work is that wireframes may require modifications once they’ve become mock-ups and visual impracticalities appear.
The entire process, with dependencies
