Development Portfolio

Here are some projects that I (Daniel Upshaw) have worked on, and a description of my involvement:

Azalea Baptist Church
Services in the Hampton Roads area. The photography for the layout was taken by me. Unfortunately the light was not very good that day, but Photoshop helped some there. It is a very heavy modification to a 3rd-party theme. The site is powered by WordPress, though I’ve configured it to be much more CMS-centric as opposed to blog-based. Extensive user role management here. For this project, I made a custom WordPress plugin with some features that a church might appreciate. This site also features scheduled scripts to improve load speed. It has an installation of Gallery2, also customized.
ODU Distance Learning Program
I designed the database structure for this site; any page with a query string (example) pulls from that database. I added a proximity search (below the flash map) that allows users to find sites within a certain range of a zip code, and also integrated the search (as well as site profiles) with Google Maps. I also worked with the XSLT and XML document flow and transformations with this project. The admin interface for this I designed from the ground up, and they have full control of the listings and selected content. It can also generate various reports.
The Issue
Online magazine by photographer and graphic designer George Kartis. This was a unique project in that the content design was already created when I came on board. My job here was to basically “make it work for the web” and put it online. The music section features an embedded flash video of “Stay Up” by I’m Turning Into, which required conversion to FLV format. The CSS and markup on this site were created from scratch.
The Friends of Chauncey E. Spencer
A one-page site to memorialize Chauncey Spencer, a man who accomplished much in his life despite trying times. The markup and styles are entirely from scratch. The logo was created using The GIMP, and a scan from the cover of his autobiography.
Oddtherapy.com
Now defunct, this project was started in 2004 and was designed to house art. All markup, styles, and code were done entirely from scratch. It uses a custom PHP framework and has its own CMS-type system. The logo and graphics were done using Inkscape and The GIMP.
Farmville Wholesale Electric Supply Company
From the archives; this one was done back in 2003 (notice the table-based layout). I’ve learned a lot since then, and I’ve got some odd things going on in the code here and there are some things that I would change if I did it over — but it works. Everything is from scratch, and it also uses a custom framework and rather extensive admin interface with unique security measures. They can even run database backups from there. A couple years before this one I had made them a site in ASP, but we switched it over to PHP with the revamp. I migrated the database to MySQL for that switch.

I’m going to stop here for now, but there are a lot more and I’ll be adding them as time allows.