Another commercial project I undertook in cooperation with Marcin from K13 Graphic Design. It was a complete package of visual identification and web presence services. Marcin did the design and print, I was responsible for the Internet part, that is a CMS, Email+Webmail, domain stuff and hosting for all these services.

The client wanted a typical company website so I decided not to reinvent the wheel and use a general purpose open-source CMS as a base. I went for CMS Made Simple, which had almost all the features I needed: a tree-like page management, rich text editor and user management. No thrills, just the right tool for the job.

However, CMS Made Simple lacked an important feature: internationalisation. I’m sure the problem has been fixed by now, but back then there were only some hacks and half-solutions available. I had to implement my own internationalisation support.

The FCKEditor required a bit of bug-fixing too. It took ages to load and its responsiveness was comparable to that of a Linux desktop (Yes! Linux is still too slow). I tweaked it until its performance was acceptable but these days I suggest you use TinyMCE instead.

One more thing I had to code by hand was a custom tax calculator module. It calculated tax penalty interest over a period of time. Sounds trivial but the rates of penalty interest in Poland have changed in the last couple of years at irregular intervals. It’s not rocket science but it took a bit of thinking before implementation.

For Webmail I chose SquirrelMail, not cutting edge but reliable, which was the key thing for my client. I host both these services on one of my own servers for quick access and modification.

Screenshots of the result (you can take a look at the live site here):

Note: J&L Creditor logo is a property of J&L Creditor company. Logos and other pictures are used only for the purpose of presentation.

Filed under: PHP, My Projects on 2007-02-22 by Damian Gaweda Add this page to: