One of the features we’re most looking forward to is the custom post types. This means that alongside regular Posts and Pages, we can have different types of, well, posts and pages. Let’s say we’re making an e-commerce site – we could use products with a separate template and set of features. This really makes a difference when using WordPress for more than just a blogging platform. While it’s still one of the best tools around for powering a blog, it’s now a real contender in the CMS market, rivalling the likes of Joomla!, Drupal and ModX.

As developers, we love the look of the new default theme, Twenty Ten. It brings us tools like custom menu structures, customisable backgrounds and different headers for each page. It’s stuff we’ve been doing ourselves for ages, and it’s great to see that the WordPress developers have given us a way of doing this natively.

What we love the most about this, though, is that the WordPress team are making things even easier for both developers and users. When we logged in to our Admin panel today, we saw an alert telling us to upgrade. So, we clicked the link, told it we were sure, and, well, it did everything for us! Same with plugins, and the “bulk update” feature, meaning that the same can be done with all your plugins. We even love the new lighter looking Admin panel along with its contextual help in case users get stuck.

We recommend you watch the official release video below, and if you’ll excuse us, we’re off to check out the new Twenty Ten API!

One of our recent projects, CMYK Converter, has been subject to a bit of attention from the blogs in the last few weeks. It began from a ’real-life’ problem that we encountered with a client. After advising that web images needed to be RGB to display properly, we recommended the client  ‘go online and get a free CMYK converter’. Well – there weren’t any and so like true Digital Gangsta’s we went and made our own. Badass, we know.

We set out to create a simple webapp that allows users to convert between different colour spectrums at the click (or a couple of clicks) and it’s proven to be a hit with a much wider audience.

Why Convert?

The RGB colour model is probably the way you’re viewing this page right now (unless you’re using some sort of printed internet). Known as an additive colour model it uses Red, Green and Blue light to make the millions of colours that we see on screen. Combining all three of these colours at once makes white, and using none of them at all makes black. So, the more light, the lighter the colour is. This works great on screen as it uses light, but when it comes to printing we have to use a different method.

That method is known as CMYK and as expected using ink rather than light, its dull by comparison. If you have a colour printer at home you’ve probably noticed that it uses Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black (the K in CMYK – it stands for Key, named after the ‘key plate’ used in the printing process). This works almost in the opposite way to RGB in that the more ink you print, the darker the colour shows up. Think of CMYK as the language that the printer understands; this is why, before sending your images to a professional printer, you have to ensure it uses the CMYK colour model.

A lot of people have slightly misunderstood the audience we’re aiming at, saying that if a graphics artist needs to convert, they could just use a professional graphics manipulation program to do it (haters). But they’re right. Photoshop lets you do this in a couple of clicks. However, we’re aiming the site at people who aren’t professionals, who have something they need printed (or, some print media that needs to be converted to RGB, remember, it can be converted both ways!) and converted in an easy way.

How we did it

We decided to stick to regular PHP behind the scenes with a user-friendly interface that minimises the amount of effort the user has to go through. By keeping the main process on just one page and using AJAX to communicate with the server we eliminate mouse clicks and page loading times. We used jQuery along with a couple of plugins to make development painless. We love using AJAX in our projects, but agree that, like flash, it shouldn’t be overused.

Now onto the backend. We used our own custom-built framework to handle the requests and actual conversion of images in the background. Sessions are used extensively in the application for the server to “remember” what image you’ve uploaded and what you want to convert it to. The main chunk of the application is achieved with an interface for PHP to communicate with ImageMagick, a server-side program which can do almost anything you want with an image, including drawing onto images, creating animation and changing colour profiles.

So, how does all of this come together? Take a look out our instructional youtube video or head over to www.CMYKconverter.com and have a go yourself.

• User uploads their image
• Image is copied to a temp directory
• User decides what colour profile to convert to and clicks convert
• Paramaters to ImageMagick are created
• ImageMagick is called to do the conversion
• Converted image is copied to download directory
• User is shown a prompt to download the image

Next steps

We have a few ideas for the site, one being a facility to upload a zip file full of images as a batch conversion. This wouldn’t be hard to implement and could be beneficial to users that need two or more images converted at once. If you have any ideas, feedback or requests for the site, please leave a comment and let us know!

We love coming up with services that people can make use of, from small things like CMYK Converter to larger bespoke systems that drive a company’s operations. We felt that, in the nature of small web2.0 webapps, it was important to keep it free to use, and it’s working well so far. We have a few more things up our sleeve that we plan to get going in the coming months, so look out for those!

Welcome to the first post of our REVEALED series. These posts are designed to give you an insider run-down of the process (and stress/energy drinks/shouting) we went through to create some of our best work. First up is the website for Bristol-based freelance film director Simon Pearce.

The Client

Simon Pearce is a young and upcoming short and feature—length director based in Bristol. His debut feature ‘SHANK’ has been released on DVD after being screened in over 60 film festivals around the world. He needed an internet presence where his fans could find him and he could share his latest projects and ventures through a blog. We met up with him and talked through his requirements in more detail, discussing what he needed to have on each page. It was clear that he wanted a clean, light and easy-to-use website that he could use to professionally present himself.

After making it look the nuts and signing off the design, it was time to get developing…

WordPress for the WIN

For Simon’s site we decided to do something we hadn’t done previously and use the well-known blogging platform WordPress. We see so many sites out there that are powered by it, and decided that it was time Digital Gangsta had some of the action! After reading about the loop and basic templating documentation it was time to get started. And, HOT DAMN, how we were impressed.

As we mentioned briefly in our last post, WordPress can scale. While most widely known as a blogging platform, there are nearly 10,000 plugins to make it do whatever you want! We’ve used a couple of these for Si’s site, and had absolutely no problems installing or configuring. When we were developing the site it felt like WordPress was made for developers. Then we handed it over to Simon and it felt like it was made for the client. We’d unconvered the success secret to WordPress – it’s bloody good. Go WP!

Since then we’ve moved our very own Digital Gangsta site over to WP and are using it to develop a larger project. It still continues to impress us. Thoroughly recommended.

To Flash or not to Flash?

When wearing a trench coat and dodgey glasses in a busy public area, definitely not to… but to add a ’flash’ of magic to a website??

We used a hint of Flash on Simon’s site to provide the cool-looking navigation menu at the top of the page. The use of Flash is discussed all over the place, with some loving its use, and an equal amount against it. Our opinion is that flash is good! and it allows things that wouldn’t otherwise be possible (like ninja cat videos on flash-powered youtube), but it must be used tastefully and respectfully.

One of the major issues with the use of flash is that search engines struggle to index its content. While this isn’t strictly true (and many still believe Google can’t ‘see’ Flash what-so-ever) as the major search engines are ever increasing their ability to make sense of SWF and other flash files. However, it’s usually still not as efficient as good old-skool mark up and Flash certainly falls victim to some navigation and linking issues. To ensure Simon’s site was as easy for search engines to navigate as humans we included discrete HTML footer links which are also handy if the user happened to scroll all the way down to the bottom of a long page.

What do YOU think?

So while Simon loves his site, as do we (but we have to as it is now one of our babies), we don’t want to become blinded by love and would really appreciate any thoughts or feedback you might have regarding www.simon-pearce.co.uk. So head on over and check it out, Simon really has some good stuff that has earned him several awards as an upcoming young director.

Firstly welcome to Digital Gangsta where we have decided to join the blogosphere of professional journo’s and wannabe web-superstars. While our focus is primarily web design we figured that in order to keep up with the online world we needed to become writers making our thoughts publicly available before concluding that sharing our knowledge might just make the web a slightly nicer, more attractive and easier place to surf. Not to mention the benefits of blogging; Search engines love it, we get to connect with our clients and other designers and hopefully we can prove that we know what we’re doing! – at least most of the time.

The blogging move was also inspired by the Pearce Twins, a power-family out to dominate their chosen industries who also saw the benefits of running a blog. Felicia Pearce is a fashion management and journalism student currently working for a major fashion forecaster who has built a popular blog about looking good after 40.  www.ShesNoPlainJane.com is powered by Blogger and skinned with a customised theme. Digital Gangsta recently made some alterations to She’s No Plain Jane to include advertising space which Felicia is now selling to businesses and other bloggers.

Simon Pearce is a young freelance film director who’s debut ‘SHANK’ made a real impact on the low-budget world of cinema. Since the films success Simon has started a variety of other projects and uses his website as an online resume to promote previous work and his built in blog to keep fans bang up-to-date with the latest developments, productions and ideas. www.Simon-Pearce.co.uk is built into WordPress as a Content Management System (CMS) so Simon can change the content of his website easily and add, edit or remove information and images as required. Word Press also acts as his blogging software and offers everything you’d expect in order to run a professional blog.

Lately we’ve been using Word Press more heavily in our projects because we can make it do almost anything we need it to. From a very small site with a couple of pages to something huge like Smashing Magazine with hundreds of posts the software scales perfectly to fit your needs. We’re really looking forward to the release of WordPress 3.0, which will bring us more features like Custom Content Types and Custom Menus, further increasing its flexibility as a great CMS.

Our aim is to use this blog as a place to write tutorials and give our readers an insight to what we do and how we do it. We use a variety of techniques to achieve the best results possible, using our expertise in Flash, JavaScript, CSS (and the very exciting CSS3) and, of course, standards compliant mark-up, so we’ll give our readers a few examples on where we’ve used each technique, how we did it, and why.

If you have any questions regarding any of the sites we’ve built – ask away and we may just reveal the secrets behind them.

Rock On.