Guy's Blog Blog from February, 2007

We're preparing for a BIG update to the look and feel of our site - completely new theme designs all over the place, the introduction (at long last) of our shopping cart and a new shiny version of our Bubbles plugin are all due in the next month or three.

As part of our planned site-wide polish, we've been kicking our product logos in to shape and here's the first two:

With so many man hours put in to developing the products, and everything else around here, we decided the logos had to do all that work some justice!

We've started taking the first baby steps in putting bits of our new shopping cart in to our website...

You now notice that our Bespoke Solutions page has a nifty currency selection tool - change the currency and watch the prices update below.

We made sure our product catalogue could be shown in all sorts of different formats using a flexible bunch of template-driven macros and I've spent the last few days abusing the system getting it to do some pretty crazy things it was never designed to do (not like me!)

For example, I've taken the macros that display a product category, individual item (which we call "bundles") and shopping basket then made several templates:

• Show the cheapest price in a category - ideal for "buy for as little as £ 99.00" type messages
• Show the title of the cheapest item
• Show a grid view (using the table-plus macro to allow column sorting) of items in a category
• Show detailed view of all items in a category
• Two views of the shopping basket - a big view that can be put in the main content area and a tiny view for sidebars
• Output the number of items in a category - ideal for "there are 15 hosting plans to choose from" type messages

It's been an absolute dream to use. Because we've used macros that are template driven, I've not had to go anywhere near a Java developer to create all kinds of custom displays of the categories, bundles and shopping basket - I just defined them all myself using a mixture of super-simple wiki markup and a scattering of simple velocity markup.

Because our Builder theme uses wiki notation to define what's in panels, it's also been really easy to display the current shopping basket in a sidebar and currency selection tools at the top of pages, etc.

For me, this is definately the way forward for online applications. While hard-coded actions are suitable for some purposes, they are inflexible. Using macros that can easily be scattered around wherever you want them gives awesome flexibility and makes polishing the UI much easier.

Combined with the portals and widgets system that's in our soon-to-be-released Bubbles plugin, it'll be super-easy to quickly throw together and customise interfaces to online applications running in Confluence.