Web Programming and Web Databases

Services Overview

Poplar ProductivityWare specializes in Web Content Management, using Drupal and WordPress. Web content management systems take the tedium out of site maintenance, so the site owner or designer can easily update frequently-changing information from a password-protected page, without having to edit the HTML pages directly or learn new software.

Poplar ProductivityWare can customize WordPress or Drupal in the following ways:

• Custom themes and templates - your site will look the way you and your designer want it to look.
• Custom content types and ways of viewing the content - your site can go beyond static pages, forums, and blog sections, to have custom data types with custom fields, and that data can be presented in many different formats -- different pages can even display it in different ways.
• Custom modules and plugins - while both Drupal and WordPress have many third-party modules and plugins available, if they don't cover your web site's needs, Poplar ProductivityWare can modify them so they do or create new ones from scratch.

Poplar ProductivityWare can use WordPress or Drupal for web sites with some or all of the following types of interactions:

• Basic - Visitors view pages on the site, with some searching, classification, and filtering capabilities
• Commerce - Visitors can find products, services, and events, and purchase or sign up for them
• Collaborative - Visitors add comments, create profiles, or even create content
• Cooperative - A team cooperates to manage the site, with different roles such as writer, editor, and adminstrator
• Private - A restricted group of people has permission to log on to see and/or manage private content and shared data

You can also hire Poplar ProductivityWare for your custom web programming jobs:

• JavaScript and AJAX: custom JavaScript and AJAX programming, for mouse-driven effects and other dynamic web pages. Poplar ProductivityWare has expertise with Google Maps, JQuery, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and AJAX technologies.
• Perl/CGI, PHP, XML, and MySQL: custom PHP and Perl scripts, backed by MySQL databases and/or using XML.
• Facebook Applications: Promote your business or expertise using an application that runs inside the Facebook social networking site
• One-on-one Tutoring: Learn how to do any of the above programming tasks, by doing them under the supervision of an experienced (and very patient) tutor/trainer. We can also provide tutoring in domain name registration, web site hosting setup, and blog installation.
• We also create other custom (non-web) software applications

For more ideas, see below to view a list of recent projects we have completed. Or, if you are a web designer or a site owner, and you already know what your web site needs, contact us today to get started!

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Recent Projects

WordPress Projects

• Created a custom WordPress plugin for conference management, including sessions, tracks, schedule pages, proposed sessions, session ratings, and sponsorship click-through tracking (PHP/MySQL).
• Created a custom WordPress plugin to manage and display featured properties, including random selection of which properties to display for each site visitor from the active choices, for the sidebar of a vacation rental web site (PHP/MySQL).
• Created WordPress plugins for RSS subscription buttons, post tagging, multiple-language blogs, and mapping, which are available for free download elsewhere on this site (PHP/MySQL/JavaScript/JQuery/AJAX/Google Maps).
• Modified a WordPress feed aggregator plugin so that it would import automatically whenever someone visited the site, only import excerpts from the posts, and only import posts containing particular keywords (PHP/RSS/XML).
• Created custom WordPress themes for several sites, working from designers' mock-ups (PHP).
• Modified a WordPress theme to handle "boolean" searches, so users could see a list of all the site's categories, check off several categories, and find posts that matched all of them.
• Reorganized and rewrote much of the WordPress documentation for developers; this is an on-going project.
• Held several interactive work/tutoring sessions with a client, where we installed and upgraded WordPress blog software, modified and built several WordPress templates with CSS, installed and modified WordPress plugins, and migrated a Movable Type blog to WordPress (MySQL/PHP/HTML/CSS).

Drupal Projects

• Built a Drupal-based site for a roofing company, including a custom theme, a roofing materials listing page, a zip-code search for past projects, a featured customer view, and a gallery of past projects by roofing material (all of the project/customer views were generated from the same entered content data) (PHP).
• Created a Drupal module that displays all users' profiles in one long page, for a high-school reunion web site (PHP).
• Created a Drupal module that reads legacy point-of-sale system data into the Drupal E-Commerce module, so that prices and inventory numbers are kept in synch between the web site and retail store (PHP/MySQL).
• Created Drupal modules that allow users to answer questions submitted by other site visitors and review products, making sure that only the latest answer/review by each person for a given question/product is kept (PHP/MySQL).

Projects with Facebook, Google Maps, and Other Web Services

• Created a Facebook application that displays a Tip of the Day, and allows application users to submit their tips for consideration. An administrative interface outside of Facebook allows the application owners to choose tips to display for each day (PHP/MySQL).
• Created a Facebook application that lets users submit suggestions, and other users rate the suggestions, with prizes granted for the most popular submitters and suggestions (PHP/MySQL).
• Created scripts to manage a process where the Amazon Mechanical Turk web service is used to gather specific information about blogs, and the information is stored in a database (XML/Perl/CGI/LWP/DBI/MySQL/AWS).
• Created scripts to manage a process where the Amazon Mechanical Turk web service is used to judge blogger's opinions, and the posts and opinions are displayed in a WordPress site (XML/Perl/CGI/LWP/DBI/MySQL/AWS/WordPress/XMLRPC).
• Created a WordPress plugin that uses Google Maps to display routes and geographical locations with blog posts. This plugin is available for free download.

Ad-Hoc Web Programming Projects

• Created an AJAX/JavaScript/Perl system for displaying RSS feeds on a web page. Contact us if you are interested in licensing this application for use on your web site.
• Created a browser-based application for reviewing the results of clinical drug trials, where all of the menus and page content is dynamically generated from XML files, which works in both Firefox and Internet Explorer 6/7 (XML/XSLT/JavaScript/JQuery/HTML/CSS).
• Wrote custom JavaScript scripts to validate input and calculate prices on a photo scanning form for a web site (JavaScript).
• Reorganized a members-only file download site for a business consortium, so that users who log in would automatically see a sorted list of files they have permission to download, with links to download them. Management of file permissions and users is through a password-protected admin page (PHP/MySQL/HTML).
• Created a password-protected on-line membership database for a non-profit organization, which allows all members of the board, including those who are less tech-savvy, to view and edit member information from their homes on their choice of web browsers (PHP/MySQL/HTML).
• Converted an HTML eyeglass frame showcase site to PHP/MySQL, so that the slide show's images, captions, and slide order could be updated more easily by the designer.
• Integrated JavaScript and PHP/MySQL into a real estate developer's web site, so that the site owner can easily update prices, house details, and availability, and the user can look at the information in several different formats, on several different pages. Also created various mouse-over and pop-up effects.
• Converted an HTML vacation condo rental site to PHP/MySQL, so that the order of the listings could rotate every few days, with one rental being "featured", and for easier maintenance. Also added drop-down menus (PHP/MySQL/HTML/JavaScript/CSS).
• Created a site for clients to download tax documents from an accounting firm, including management page for firm personnel; advised firm on security issues and remedies (PHP/MySQL/HTML/JavaScript).
• Added client file upload capability to a web site (Perl/CGI/HTML).

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