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Some More Tools

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As you can see from the site so far, things are moving along rather nicely. I've got my database all set up to start adding T-Shirts, and all that's left is to design the templates that display the data on the website. It really is that simple, it just takes a good plan and the ability to stay on track with the development.

Today however, I thought I would take a break from the building of the site and concentrate a little on some of the tools I'm using to make the T-Shirt site.

We've seen from the previous post, that to build the website, I created my own cms with Django. That's one tool that I absolutely love, but even more than the tool, I really like the thought of designing things with a framework. As you can probably tell, Django isn't the only framework that I'm using. For the templates, I'm putting them together with a framework as well, and like the app framework, it makes things very convenient.

The CSS framework that I'm using is called emastic, and you can checkout the latest source code using svn here. The reason I use a framework, is because it gives me a starting point to design a site with features I almost always use. Granted each website is different, but there are certain things you'll always want to do, like design in a grid, or keep the layout fluid. I also like to start with a standard typeface and modify it for a particular page or sidebar element or whatever meets my fancy.

Another reason that I use emastic, is the fact that a lot of times I need to get a site up and ready to demo it for a specific feature. It helps to be able to put the feature, which is usually some sidebar element, it the place it's intended to live on the site when it's completely live. It's also pretty nice to be able to style a particular piece independent of the site. Call me crazy but I find working on things in pieces much easier than trying to tackle the whole thing at one time.

The other important tool that I use is my ssh client. Yup, I do it old school, well not really I connect to make changes, but I do all my editing in text editor first, view it on a development server and then upload the changes via Filezilla to production. I'm not into all these fancy programs to edit your site like Dreamweaver. Since I use mostly frameworks, I've eliminated the need for most of these tools. Not that I don't think those tools are great, because they are, I just like to hand code my files because I feel more comfortable doing that then letting some editor add code automatically.

So that's it for tools. I got the question a few times and thought that i should answer it here first before I started to respond to all the emails. If you have some tools that you can't live without, I would sure like to know about them, so send them my way or leave a comment, that way everyone can hear about them.

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