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Project Details

  • Employer: GigaShock, LLC
  • Client: Sheri Nagy Artist
  • Date: 2009, 2010
  • Type: Website and CMS
  • Teammates: Stephen Krings

Project Tags

The following tags have been assigned:

Media Gallery

Home page of the site featuring randomly selected work samples from the gallery.The gallery listing for the different pieces of artwork featured on the site.The "About Sheri" page of the site which includes a bit of history and other information about the artist.
The private administrative management interface available to the site owners to manage content.A sample of the TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor used to easily manage page content.Form for adding new image entries to the site's gallery.
The gallery administration features including the ability to add, delete, edit, and organize items in the gallery.

Sheri Nagy Artist

This project was done as part of my work as owner and lead developer with GigaShock, LLC. Sheri Nagy is an artist and resident of Missoula, Montana. Her work consists primarily of artistic sculptures and paintings of varying size. For this project it was necessary to create a website that could showcase visual samples of her work to the world as well as list pertinent information about each piece that would be relevant to those interested in purchasing her work. While they were not interested in incorporating e-commerce features in the site when it was initially built the architecture of the site was intentionally created in such a way that the addition of e-commerce services in the future would be a trivial addition.

This project consisted of a full setup and maintenance of the environment including domain name registration as well as provisioning and managing the web server, database server, MySQL database resources, and email accounts associated with this project. Another goal of this project was to allow Sheri to make updates to her website herself at any time of day without having to send out a change request and wait for a developer to receive the request and make the content updates to the website. At the same time, it was necessary to make the process of managing the site as simplistic as possible and reduce the likelihood of any problems interfering in the process.

Therefore, after creating the visual design of the site and getting it approved I created a lightweight content management system (CMS) that was specifically tailored to the needs of this site. The features of this CMS included user authentication to prevent unauthorized access to the administrative management interface, the ability to make content changes to any page on the site using a TinyMCE WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor, and the ability to upload, organize, and manage the images and associated data that make up the site's gallery.

Part of the gallery administration features also involved collecting information about uploaded images, programmatically cropping these images to correctly fit within a proper square regardless of their original proportions, and automatically creating thumbnail versions of the uploaded images on the fly which would be used to decrease page load times for site visitors. In this instance I made use of the GD Graphics Library for PHP to automate these processes which allowed the site owners to upload any image they wanted without needing to worry about the file type of the image, having to properly size it, or create correct thumbnails manually.