Zenwerx

While trying to find a simple forum system for use by FindieRock I ran across a little gem called bbPress which intrigued me. I am considering using wordpress to host the blog portion of the Findie Rock site, and that got me started thinking. I wanted to involve a community section on Findie, and if I had to do any integration with wordpress I wouldn’t want to do it again with a piece of forum software either. This is where a little google-fu lead me to bbPress, which does integrate nicely with wordpress… although it does run beside wordpress, and is not a plugin. I was a little disappointed by this, but we will see what we can do. The other disappoint here is theming support. I was really hoping bbPress would integrate nicely with existing wordpress themes, but this is not the case! I either have to find a pair of themes that look nice together, or complete retheme one side or the other if I want them to look nice (not a task I’m particularly interested in doing).

Anyway, we’ll see how this goes. As of right now theme integration has failed horribly. Maybe I need to do some more research to see if there’s a better option for forums which integrate nicely with a Zend Framework site without me coding it from scratch.

Most of my personal development focus for the last couple months has been on my new site: Findie Rock : Find Indie Rock . This project has been a lot of fun, and a great learning experience (which I’ll turn into a dev posting later). I haven’t had the chance to make a site like this from the ground up in a very long time and the time is well spent.

The basic premise for the site is to be able to find Indie Rock events near where you are. I use a geoip solution to find your approximate location and then do a radius search to find events near there. When the events are found I plot them on a google map. There’s more to the site, obviously but I feel that this (which is what you see on the main page) is the most important part.

Other options for the site include looking at albums, artists, venues, and even other indie rock events. I have a large database of all these things so I allow you to take a look at what we have on file.

Right now everything is read only, but user contributed information is slated. I would actually like to start a rating system as well to allow users to say what they like and don’t like, as well allow them to filter their views based on this. But, that’s something for the future!

Ok… a new project has launched, finally! I’ve got Findie Rock now up and running. The functionality is a little sparse at the moment, but main page (Events/Artists/Albums) should work for searching. The artist page also has details for the artist you select. The new features are coming along at a fast pace as I nail them down, but things might change as I decide to do things differently. We’ll see how it goes.

This has been a good exercising using the Zend Framework. I hadn’t used it for anything large scale yet, but I’m definitely getting the hang of it. There were some steep learning curves, but after I was ramped up to speed I’m churning pages out like made. There’s so much functionality there which I had to do by hand before. Definitely a tool I’m going to be keeping around for future projects.

Stay tuned for more updates!

Today is the release of a new project : TwitFeed. It is a live streaming twitter plugin for wordpress. You can have your blog updating with content from twitter in real time. Follow your favourite people, or track keywords related to your site.

Go on and check it out.