We’re at the very last few days of #30daysofcreativity and I’ve been talking about my new site where I’ll be collecting presentations from different conferences, SpeechesAreHot.com. After hitting some minor obstacles along the way, the site is now live.
This is post 27 of 30 for #30daysofcreativity.
It’s nothing huge, just a very simple site for embedding videos. That’s it. The purpose is to simply gather videos for those of us who can’t (yet) afford to regularly fly around the globe to attend these things.
The site was originally built upon the Symfony 2 PHP framework. Since it was built upon the preview of the new Symfony version, it required PHP 5.3. Unfortunately—as I was deploying the site—I discovered the the MediaTemple (dv) still runs PHP 5.2 which means the site wouldn’t work.
So I had two choices: either I upgrade to PHP 5.3 and risk my client’s sites going down, or I migrate to a different platform. Since I prefer keeping my clients, I chose the latter. Besides, it’s always fun to learn something new.
I’ve actually wanted to try out ExpressionEngine for quite a while now so it wasn’t that big of a deal. A couple of hours after downloading it and pulling up the documentation, the site was running on ExpressionEngine 1.6.9, which by the way is built on CodeIgniter—another framework I enjoy working with.
It seems though that you’ll never get to play around with any code using this platform. It’s great since it’s very client friendly, but I’d personally rather use Symfony and have some more fun. However, this is a site that shouldn’t take up much time so it’s a rather good choice after all.
The result of building this quick site was that I learned both a new framework and a new blogging platform. I’m happy with that, and I hope that you’ll find it useful as well. Keep checking in—I’ll be adding more videos whenever I come across a good one.
By the way, it’s using a lot of CSS3 so if you’re using an old browser you’re screwed and I don’t care. And instead of complaining about the design, help me create something cool. I’m a developer.