How Do You Make Your Website?

[josesantos]

Originally Posted by dcarr

Just because WordPress and other CMS's are easy to use out of the box doesn't mean they can't be customized extensively and the students won't understand the functionality of the code.

Have them develop a custom theme (or heavily modify an existing one), and instead of using plugins for certain functionality, create it from scratch.

When it comes to web design, why re-invent the wheel?

That's how we did it. Using WordPress as a CMS makes it easy for everyone to make pages on our site, but we wrote a custom theme in Notepad++/Sublime Text.

[rachelholladay]

I can add my team into the "Notepad++ we hand code every bit" camp. I like having complete control...

[Dan Richardson]

We mostly use Wordpress on the backend. We find their themes to be elegant and simple to use. Not having time to develop custom themes or plugins hasn't seemed to limit us. It allows us to focus on the content. But the customization tools are there if desired.

Two different themes: iR3creative.com and robotin3days.com

[MAldridge]

we use a joomla backend with template; my site everything is done in nano.

[raphaelchang]

Our team coded a full-featured CMS from scratch using PHP and MySQL. Because we also use our website to manage membership and handle team events, we thought it would be useful to have a unified interface to perform all those tasks. Our CMS features a theming system, a posts/pages system, and a media gallery system (similar to WordPress). It can also manage events, orders, and member lists.

[ace94x]

I agree with your mentors 100%
My mentors first wanted me to create a site using joomla or wordpress I told them no, probable a bad idea but the end result has been great, I am the only web developer on my team, I have created our website over the summer (still tweaking it) and I used 100% custom code, there are the few lines of code from google maps and from google analytics, but that is it, even the images were created by my using GIMP, my suggestion use Notepad++ it is perfect for creating websites from scratch, then use a free host like 000webhost for testing in a locked folder then once it is complete upload to your teams site, now because most sites vary like ours did you may have to change things, like I had to, but never just jump into it using a CMS or a WYSIWYG, I am working on a custom CMS now for my teams website (Menu based) hoping to work with all customs sites in the future. Once I finish it I will post it on chief delphi, I just started it so I am not far along though. the CMS will require you to already have a site created though, because custom sites are better than template sites.

[reymac]

We use Wordpress with a some custom CSS. Wordpress really helps with content management.

www.Edison73.com

[bvisness]

Our team uses Concrete5 for our CMS. It lets you base an entire theme off one template page, which we custom-designed. Concrete5 literally lets you just specify which tags inside your page should be editable by the CMS.

That said, I personally would like to transition to Wordpress...I have found the ease of use and flexibility to be beyond any other CMS I have used.

[jwallace15]

I think our team used Joomla for our current website... However, we're switching to Weebly for this season. I have personal experience with Weebly and think it's a great website-creating tool!

[dowster]

Were currently building our new site from scratch (using Sublime Text 2 (Mainly for the font rendering, it's so darn pretty on Ubuntu 12.10) to code and using the Inspector feature in Chrome is a godsend for choosing color values, setting spacing, etc). We started with using bootstrap to get the front-end going and now are working on building up our CMS. To make posts and stuff we have to go into phpmyadmin but in the end we will have a fully featured editor inside (paragraphs, image inserts, video inserts, the whole shebang). Our main emphasis on this is not primarily getting it done, but getting it done nicely and commenting properly so that we get that started as a habit for future, and so that newbies can jump in and know what each bit of code is doing.

Originally Posted by ace94x

I agree with your mentors 100%
My mentors first wanted me to create a site using joomla or wordpress I told them no, probable a bad idea but the end result has been great, I am the only web developer on my team, I have created our website over the summer (still tweaking it) and I used 100% custom code, there are the few lines of code from google maps and from google analytics, but that is it, even the images were created by my using GIMP, my suggestion use Notepad++ it is perfect for creating websites from scratch, then use a free host like 000webhost for testing in a locked folder then once it is complete upload to your teams site, now because most sites vary like ours did you may have to change things, like I had to, but never just jump into it using a CMS or a WYSIWYG, I am working on a custom CMS now for my teams website (Menu based) hoping to work with all customs sites in the future. Once I finish it I will post it on chief delphi, I just started it so I am not far along though. the CMS will require you to already have a site created though, because custom sites are better than template sites.

Something you might want to try is running a local copy of XAMP and throwing your site files into the htdocs folder. I find it easier to just save it and refresh the browser than wait for FTP. Albeit my internet is intermittent at times.

Also, for teams facing disk space restrictions with their host, try outsourcing your images to a resource like imgur. We have tons of images and it's a lot easier to just keep a database of the urls, original names, descriptions etc. and either just serve the image directly from imgur, or redirect it with our own script (at the expense of bandwidth).

[synth3tk]

We've used custom-coded sites and Wordpress in the past. I prefer Wordpress.

To those saying that you want students to custom-code a site starting from a 0 byte text file, that's fine, and I'm not arguing against the fact that they'll learn a lot from the experience. In fact, they'll gain a good amount of useful experience. What goes into creating a CMS/website, coding under pressure, and everything in between.

But let's not get into the mindset that using Wordpress or Drupal or Joomla is not a valuable learning experience, either. A lot can be learned from both.

[Mongai]

Originally Posted by MAldridge

we use a joomla backend with template; my site everything is done in nano.

Nano? What Linux box are you using? Is it a school computer?

[nathan_hui]

CHS Robotics currently uses a Wordpress site with a couple MediaWiki applications hiding in some subdirectories. We tried writing our own CMS earlier, but found it hard to maintain (webmasters keep graduating and going away). Wordpress is nice because it's maintained by someone whose job is to maintain Wordpress for a very long time, but it's hard to integrate it with some of the other applications we have and want. While I agree with some of the other mentors in that the students should understand what's going on, a full featured and modular CMS isn't a simple program to understand and maintain. Kudos to the teams that do make their sites from scratch an maintain it for more than four years!

[Ernst]

We use Drupal.

Our new website that we made last year, as well as our newer new one for this year, were both made with Drupal. We previously used Wordpress, but found that we didn't get all of the functionality that we wanted. After a bit of brainstorming, our website now has user accounts for team members, parents, and mentors. We have private news pages, private calendars, as well as calendars to sign up for work shifts and after school dinners that we offer. We have private rosters with contact information and sub-team lists. Our team is growing substantially, and we're hoping that our updated website will help us to organize and manage it better.

[MAldridge]

Originally Posted by Mongai

Nano? What Linux box are you using? Is it a school computer?

I carry a laptop with me at school, and some of the school machines run linux, but only where I knew it would be an acceptable switch (am one of a few students who manage the computer labs and network at my school).