Introduction

As a developer in a corporate environment, much of my work has been inward facing. This page has been created to try to showcase some of the highlights of my work at Edge Hill University in the last four years.

Symfony

From day one at Edge Hill I have worked with the php framework, Symfony.

Due to the diverse nature of the content and complexity of much of the code, work has been restricted to version 1.0, although I have recently begun work on the jobeet tutorial and progress can be seen at : http://symfony.redocean.net/frontend_dev.php/job

News and Events

One of the first projects that I influenced after starting at Edge Hill University was the News and Event repository.  The first task was to export from that system and import into a MySql database using a field mapping job built in symfony.

The new symfony backend allowed the addition of new news stories with the added benefit of being able to search, tag and expose the backend data through a number of different serialised data formats: RSS,  Json and Yaml.  This made the provision of news stories available to all of the university sites eliminating the need to duplicate content.

The events backend added api calls to Upcoming, giving the authors of the event the option to publicise the event to a wider audience.  Dialogue has started in replacing the Upcoming option/api with Facebook events.

During the recent Corporate site redesign, Marketing asked for greater control over what was displayed on the home page and the emphisis attibuted to each item.  There was also a requirement to mix content, news, events and video.  I delivered the following which has a BBC style news feel and allows total control over the content by the Marketing department.

The interface uses jQuery drag and drop and allows complete customisation of the data depending where on the page it is dropped. The following screen grab shows the available news, events and video content available in a tabbed div for inclusion on the page and the bin for removing unwanted content:

Rose Theatre

The Rose Theatre is Edge Hill’s own theatre and has a Summer School and a Youth Theatre in addition to the many performing arts and films that are put on. The Rose Theatre shares the main university corporate design but because the mega menu navigation would be inappropriate it was replaced with the thumbnail scroller in the header section of the page.

The homepage makes use of rollovers which expose a taste of the information that lies beneath.  This concept was developed further for the Shortcuts (cinema) section of the site; the difference being that full length background images were used for each film. The process was developed using a combination of jQuery and AJAX calls to the site backend to pull data dynamically.

Campus Map

The Edge Hill University campus map is still under development.  To date the super large image has been thrown at Microsoft’s wonderful Seadragon and a backend has been created for buildings and faculties with X, Y and Z (zoom level) co-ordinates, together with long and lat co-ords ready for a Google maps replacement.

Most recently, images and video capability has been added to the buildings which when clicked opens the gallery in a lightbox, using jQuery.