Below I have attached a screenshot of the new admin interface.

A sneak preview of what is to come in Furasta.Org 1.0

The release won’t be feature packed, but the plugin architecture should be working. Note that the SVN has not been updated in ages, but I should get around to it next week as well.

Capture the Flag Part 3

This time I have deviated from the rules a wee bit. The red player is controlled by the CPU, while the user controls the blue player. Once again the objective is to capture the red flag and return it to your blue base. If you bump into a player who has a flag then flag gets returned to it’s base.

The players, and flags have three random starting positions each. I have re-written this example from scratch, not using any of the code from part one or two. I am happy with the code this time, and have done my best to make it effective.

The red player has two modes, aggressive and defensive. When the game starts the red player attempts to capture the flag and return it to it’s red base automatically. If at any point the blue player acquires his flag the red player will go into defensive mode and attempt to recover his flag.

To throw a spanner in the works I have added a BOOST and an obstacle. The boost can gradually makes the player who absorbs it smaller to increase evasive skills. It also makes the player a lot faster. The obstacle has two modes. If you bump into it the wrong way, you will simply bump off it. If you follow the arrows through the obstacle with your player then you will receive a big speed bonus. Both these items will prove vital in winning against the red player, who moves faster than the blue one.

Controls

Up Key – Move Up
Down Key – Move Down
Left Key – Move Left
Right Key – Move Right

Learn more about this project

The whole course centers around the use of Java, I’m not sure yet if we are going to be using anything else. We haven’t actually even started with Java yet, but we are using this program called Scratch to program our Java for us! I wouldn’t say that it is the Dream-weaver of Java, far from it. In fact I think that it is a great method of getting into Java. It has a set of preconfigured code which you can arrange into blocks, which then run – quite similar to the source of Java actually except simplified. It also eliminates the need for compiling.

Last week I went to my first “lecture” which was good enough, but I learned something valuable that day; computer hardware is not the road that I want to go down! I didn’t really enjoy the hardware aspect of the day but when it came to the Scratch lessons I was flying! For our first assignment we had to write a game in Scratch, which is essentially it’s own unique programing language. The game is called “Capture the Flag”. I was actually flat out all week and didn’t get a chance to start work on it until today, which is coincidentally the deadline for it’s completion! I spent about three hours making the game, here’s the manual and the game:

Capture The Flag

Overview
Capture the flag is a simple two player game which involves stealing the flag from the opposite colours corner.

Controls
Blue Player
Up Arrow Key = Move Up
Down Arrow Key = Move Down
Left Arrow Key = Move Left
Right Arrow Key = Move Right

Red Player
W Key = Move Up
S Key = Move Down
A Key = Move Left
D Key = Move Right

Rules
To gain a point a player must capture the opposite colour flag and return it to their base (the starting point).

If a player is in possession of a flag and his opponent touches him the flag is returned to it’s base and the player to his base.

To win a player must gain three points.

Faults
The one fault with the game is that, at least on my computer, when one player is using the keyboard to move the other player cannot move simultaneously. Although this is a fault it does also make the game a bit more interesting because the players have to fight even to move!

Learn more about this project

Anyway to celebrate the birthday of my Blog I decided to do it up a wee bit. I added a nice wee sidebar to my theme, which I am actually thinking of releasing at some stage in the near future. Also I added a new download manager to http://files.macaoidh.name . It is very useful; it keeps track of how many people are downloading what. Hopefully in the future it will give me an idea of what people that view my blog like and don’t like. I will actually have to go over all my previous posts and make sure that the download links are correct considering there was a big change in the link format.

The only real reason I wrote the thing is because someone has commissioned me to do something similar, starting next week. But the commissioned work will be a bit more complete and stuff. So feel free to try and hack my system. I don’t want to find faults when I’m finished writing it and then have to go back… The manager also serves as a very useful tool for me. I have included an admin area in which I can log in, upload files and choose to store them, make them available for download or even to download + password protect them! This feature will no doubt come in handy, I like to think of it as my personal, non-user-information-gathering, version of Google Docs!

What else has been happening recently… ooh I am in the process of making/releasing an album with The Dominican Affair. It is called Stealing the Ceiling. We have our last mixing session this weekend and hope to have it available on piratebay towards the end of October! It will also be available to purchase or download at http://www.holygrailrecords.com

Just thought I’d mention that 6th year is terribly shit. I can manage to squeze about 2 hours of programing in thrice a week. Also I am doing an Introduction to Computer Science Programing course in UCD over the next few months just to prepare me for college and to make sure that I actually want to study Computer Science! It will be good craic to learn Java at that course; I plan to make a facebook application/game when I have learned Java and base it in Monaghan.

Oghgbjkc damn! I just realised that I still haven’t renewed my macaoidh.name subscription! Better get to it… three days left…..

Dynamic Search Plugin

The dynamic search plugin enables you to search different sections of your website dynamically. You can choose between searching Site Wide or a selection of categories. You can add catagories in the admin area. A catagory must be a pagename and the plugin will search that page and all sub pages. The plugin also keeps a record of the most popular searches and displays a link to them on the main search page.

The entire plugin is written in both PHP and jQuery. The PHP end acts as a backup for the javascript end. It also allows you to use your own search form to display results from this plugin, as I have done on the MMC site.

Download | View Live

Mailing List Plugin

This is a plugin that I released a while ago but I have made a few changes recently. Previously there was PHP form validation which replaced the form itself if you made a mistake. The problem with that was, depending on the setup of your website, it might not work layout wise. Thats why I have replaced it with a nice jQuery alert, similar to the one I am using on Furasta. The changes aren’t large enough to release a new version but I have updated the SVN and supplied a new download link.

Download | View Live

News Plugin

I wrote this plugin trying my best to make it compatible with the Dynamic Search plugin. If you want to create a news page then you just choose news as the page type. To add a new news item you simply create a new subpage of the news page. If you look at the News page in the frontend it will show a summary of all the news items. It is a very simple plugin which has no database, only 4 files and features pagated results. You can also search the News section easily using the Dynamic Search plugin.

Download | View Live

I also did quite a lot of work on a Music Store plugin which works similar to the iTunes Store. The plugin is not live yet but it will be soon and in the end I decided not to release it, for the moment anyway, because it gets very complicated when dealing with paypal access details. If anyone wants a copy for it, at a price, I can tailor it for your exact needs.

Also Michael Dever will be helping me out and developing some of the code himself. I am very excited about this new version, as it is a full re-write it will give me an opportunity to include some of the features that I have been thinking about for quite a while, such as:

1. Plugin Architecture. Hopefully I can make this work well. I have looked carefully at the architectures of WordPress, Webme and Joomla and I hope to make one that can beat them all in performance and ease of use.

2. Users and Permissions. The CMS will include the ability to create different users, which have certain permissions to access certain pages. This is something which I touched on in v0.1.5 but intend to improve.

3. New Control Panel. The admin area will now comprise of a new, simplified, control panel. The aim here is to create a CP that looks empty, but which is full of content.

4. News Page + Comments Feature. I have wanted this for a while. Once I am confident enough with it I will move my WordPress blog to Furasta to prove that it works.

5. Possibly a simple file manager. Although I am strongly considering using KFM.

6. Re-write of the Smarty syntax. Possibly get rid of smarty all together.

Because of the massive difference between v0.1.5 and v1.0 the website http://furasta.org will have to be reconstructed. But it’s all very exciting. Now less talk and I have to get down to the action, tomorrow, after a bit of WOW.

I have abandoned all of the old code and opted to write the whole thing again from scratch. Considering how long it took me to write v0.1.5, about a month of flat out coding every night, I expect v0.2 to be completed in the same sort of timescale. One thing is for sure – there will be no micro-optimisation this time! After all the effort I put into that last time the damn program was still slow. This time I will invest my executable time in more important tasks, ones that only directly affect what’s going on as you load the page, and perform tasks such as server side caching through AJAX so the user doesn’t notice it.

The project is also going to be available from svn from now on. Since I am writing it from scratch there are only a few files in the svn at the moment and there’s also no installation script. But that will come in time!

http://code.google.com/p/furasta-cms/source/checkout

I am taking a completely different approach to writing the CMS this time. In fact I would go as far as calling it an engine rather than a CMS. Basically what I plan to do is build a solid framework that on it’s own does nothing, but has the ability to do everything. There will be no pages except the essential homepage. Everything, I mean everything that will give this program the characteristics of a CMS will be achieved by the plugin architecture. So for example to edit and display pages, I will create a plugin. Obviously the CMS will have to be shipped with a few default plugins, which it will be possible to disable through a plugin manager plugin! I might be going a bit overboard with this idea but in theory it seems like a good one!

So enough talking, time to start writing!

So what is the solution? Webme Banner Image Plugin v0.1! This plugin creates something very similar to the in-built logo function. It allows you to upload your own banner image and display it in your banner area. You could actually use the logo function in the exact same way, but I thought that some people would like to have a logo and still change their banner image.

All you need to do to make this work is:

• Activate the plugin with the new Webme inbuilt plugin manager.
• Put the code {BANNER} in your template where you would like the banner to appear.
• Go to options>banner image and upload your image.

Simple as that. You can download the plugin with svn:

svn checkout http://webworks-webme.googlecode.com/svn/ww.plugins webme-plugins

Or you can download the plugin by clicking here.

• Customisable mailing list form on the sidebar so that visitors can subscribe to the list.
• Verification email to the person registering to confirm their subscription.
• Easy to follow, sortable list of emails collected in the admin area.
• Ability to send email to everyone on the list at once.
• Options section which enables you to customise everything!

This type of plugin will be usefull for many organisations out there. I am currently working on making it compatible with WordPress.

Download Plugin | Visit Webme.eu Download Page

I would appreciate any feedback or feature requests on the plugin here. Thanks

* Reader Sighs, not another bloody theme change… *

You are right, this is not just another theme change but a complete website overhaul! Over the past few months, in fact ever since I made the blog, I have been changing theme pretty regularily. That is because I never found a damn theme that I actually liked! So the other day I was bored and said f**k it I’ll just make my own theme and then everything will be the way I want it right? Wrong. No actually your right I just wanted to grab your attention again!

Then acting on my bordness I thought about the idea for a few days and came up with and ingenious idea to loose all of my blog traffic – move the blog to a new subdomain! And that’s exactly what I did and that’s exactly where you are now. In my subdomain, your in my subdomain. Being a web developer and not a web designer I have to think about designs for a few days before something hits me. And a few days ago this design hit me. So I made it.

Just in case you have not yet noticed, macaoidh.name is now split up into three different websites! Overkill I say. Who said that? Anyway.. there is my web design/developement portfolio located at http://portfolio.macaoidh.name, my blog located here at http://blog.macaoidh.name and my home page located at http://macaoidh.name. My blog being a blog runs WordPress, so that’s one WordPress theme I had to come up with. Both my Homepage (I really don’t know what I was thinking about making that…) and my Portfolio run Furasta CMS, which to those of you that aren’t complete randomers and actually know me, is my CMS. I own it. It’s mine. Is liomsa é.

Bored yet? So am I.

So I now have a nice wee set up going on which I don’t plan to change in the foreseeable future. I might actually release my wp theme at some stage, I’ll see what people think of it first. At the moment I would like some comments on the design. Display problems? I think not. Unless you are using IE6 because that’s like the only browser it’s not tested in. One design problem that struck me; to sidebar or not to sidebar? I decided in the end as you can see to go for not to sidebar. All WordPress blogs have sidebars, at least all that I have seen. So I decided not to conform and to but my RSS link up on the main menu.

That’s about it. If you are a new reader or an old reader who’s feed got messed up by the domain change, then don’t hesitate to subscribe to my feed! It’s the bright orange icon on my main menu.