I know I’ve not written anything here for 2 or 3 weeks (if not more), I’ve been pretty busy with moving out, etc. and have had fairly little that I want to blog about on here. Plus, when I get back from work I don’t really want to sit on my computer for ages (as that’s what I do at work).
I know this (technically) means that I have failed Project 52, but I’m still going to (try) and write a post a week on here, as I quite enjoy it.

Graduation!

I also graduated the other day, so go me! Along with the rest of my class at the Caird hall on Thursday the 8th of July I walked along that stage, got tapped on the head by Lord Cullen, and collected myself that upper 2nd class honours degree! I’ll be getting a picture up soon,  I just need to go home and take one first, or get the photos my mum took that day.

Heres a picture for you to enjoy of my class:

ps pictures were “stolen” from Attila Szomor as I’m still waiting to get the ones my family took and wanted to post something here…

New Beginnings

After spending the best part of the weekend clearing stuff out of my old flat and into the new it’s starting to dawn on me that things are changing at a relatively fast pace for me right now (and I’m not complaining).

First I landed myself a nice job as a Web Developer for MTC Media right here in Dundee (which I started at last month), now I find myself moving out of what I have called home for the past 3 years into a new flat, and with new flatmates (and a cat called Tiggy). I also believe that relatively soon MTC Media will be moving offices as they have expanded so much in the past year they want/need to move on to (hopefully) bigger and better things, so that’ll be another pretty big change happening relatively soon.

New Site Design?

I got thinking while I was looking at my portfolio a few days ago, and it has been the same for quite a long time now (A year? Two? I can’t remember…). I think that, along with (what seems like) the rest of my life, it’s time for a change.

No doubt it’ll take me weeks to finally get around to doing something about this as I still need to set up my desktop in the new place, and my netbook is no place to start designing a new site. I have a few ideas for it, and also want to completely revamp the back-end of it (and no I really don’t want to show anyone what is there right now – it’s that dire), integrating it with the WordPress login and authentication that I was talking about a few weeks ago.

Give me a few months (maybe in time for Christmas, but don’t hold me to that…I do work now) and I’ll see what I can come up with.

I also want to start doing some photography as a side project kind of thing in the comming months, at the moment my camera doesn’t get used enough! So expect a few posts with pictures of random things quite soon…

The Task is:

I want to login to WordPress at the same time as I login to my own custom built admin section (i.e. using the same login form). I want it to then display a page saying something along the lines of “Which CMS did you want to view? WordPress or Custom” (with links obviously – this will just be a redirect after login, so shouldn’t be hard to implement). I don’t mind so much about logging out, but might look into it if logging in becomes a success.

I looked for a solution to this problem about a year ago whenever it was I re-designed this portfolio site, but never found an answer. Then recently, at work I had to hook up a login script of VBulletin to a custom admin area (no simple task as I soon found out) which got me thinking about this again, and how to get round it.

I plan to start looking through WordPress’ code to see how they deal with the login whenever I get the time (either this week or next week), but thought I may as well post it on here to see if anyone who reads this blog knows of any solution.

The only thing I really need to find is the login function (or what I assume would be a function), so I can then include the correct files and call the function. I might go on to then look at how WordPress authenticates if the user is logged in or not, and possibly try to use that as my own authentication (as no doubt it’d be more secure that way – it would also mean I didn’t have to set my own session variables that are used to authenticate my own login).

A few problems I face:

1. My site and my WordPress use different databases – they may need to be combined.
2. Depending how WP is set up I may need to include a fair bit of unnecessary code.
3. If WordPress updates then it might screw with where certain files are located and require me re-do the login script slightly (but that can be dealt with when it happens).

But other than that I don’t think it should be that hard to do (but we’ll see).

Anyone done this (or similar) before that could point me in the right direction?