With interest in Imperium growing and the commercial projects it’s being used on grows, it only seems fitting that the project gets its own domain and support forum. To that end I’ve purchased and set up www.imperiumcms.co.uk and the linked support forum at www.imperiumcms.co.uk/forum/ to allow interested parties to contribute to the project and its future development.
With the addition of the skinning feature where admins can upload a css file and then activate it to change the look of the site. Obviously, the beauty of this is that 3rd parties can develop new looks for the site and make them available to other users.
Finally, I’ll be making a demo admin available via a sub-domain in the near future so interested parties can log in and take a look around at how various features work and offer feedback on suggestions, etc.
So why not pop over to the site and forums and offer your support and feedback for Imperium CMS.
While Interakt were bought out by Adobe some time ago, I’ve still continued to use KTML as my rich text editor of choice in commercial projects and in the development of Imperium CMS. However, with a major problem with the way the file upload facility works with IE and my current hosting company, I’ve been forced to look elsewhere for the required functionality.
Because of this issue, I’ve spent the last 2 days searching, downloading, installing and configuring a range of RTE’s with various levels of success. However, I think I’ve finally settled on the popular TinyMCE editor in conjunction with the Image Manager plug in to handle all the image uploading functions.
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A new Imperium powered web site has been launched for Thinkkit (a project by Kingsley Wiggin) an illustration based promotion site. Kingsley Wiggin (the site owner and illustrator) required a clean and easy to use web site to promote his expansive range of illustrations which have been used in magazines and on magazine covers as well as offer the site visitor the ability to purchase prints of his many images.
I used Imperium as the main core to the site and added a range of eCommerce facilities to the modular back-end to offer a range of selling options.
The latest build of Imperium (1.1.3) uses Lightbox 2.0 to present the gallery of images in an effective manner. Lightbox is also now heavily utilised in the Administration of the site to make working with image galleries far more straighforward.
The site can be viewed here.
Imperium has undergone some new features and some additional tweaks to both the front end and the back end over the last couple of days. In addition to these updates, I’ve started work on branding the whole Imperium CMS to give it a complete identity for commercial purposes.
The branding will spread over to an Imperium powered site that will either become part of I-Pixel: Creative Simplicity or will have its own domain and identity, including demo information, version history, online help and training and maybe some other things too.
In addition to the new logo design, all sites using Imperium will feature the new Powered by Imperium link icon (pictured below).
This link icon will provide a link back to the forthcoming Imperium web site, and the aim is to provide information about the software. The second aim is that by giving Imperium a brand of its own it will generate additional site development opportunities in conjunction with I-Pixels web presence.
Some more new features added today, and still a lot of tweaking and cleaning up is going on to streamline and enhance the project.
New Feature: Google Analytics
Google Analytics has been built into the site to offer the end user the ability to simply paste in their relevant code and all pages on the front end of the site have this included. So tracking your pages should be pretty straightforward without having to delve into any code yourself.
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Imperium reaches a new milestone build today (1.1.0) with a range of new features as well as some major tweaks to the Administration Control Panel.
With every site that I develop using Imperium, I learn a little more and add some new features which sometimes filter down into the new build of the core product. However, today I’ve spend about 7 hours developing the core Imperium module to offer a more cohesive and streamlined navigational structure, as well as a range of new and tweaked features.
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As I spend more time dealing with accessability issues, I’ve tried to impliment various features into Imperium. So, today I’ve started adding the ability to use accesskeys and titles to master categories in the main navigation and in the footer navigation areas.
So far so good! Now when you add a master category, you can include these optional fields of information into the database and your site.
Still laods more to go, but v1.02 is good to go with the new features. 
Today’s been a pretty productive day for me in relation to website design; I’ve mocked up 2 commercial projects and got one signed off already. When I developed the Paraventure website 3 years ago (jeez, how long?), I submitted 3 different designs; one of which was black, grey and orange and since then the client has referred back to that design on numerous occassions (after choosing an alternative design for the site). So designing the PAP Paramotors UK layout, I drew upon this feedback to develop a site based around those colours.
Paraventure are a UK distributor of PAP Paramotors, and this site is being developed to promote and sell them in the UK. Initially we discussed a simple brochure web site, but it soon became apparent that the need to be able to update the web site on an ongoing basis was required and we decided that the Imperium CMS (developed by me at I-Pixel). Read the rest of this entry »
The Imperiumtm (Latin for control) CMS that I have been developing for use in my business (I-Pixel: Creative Simplicity) has recently moved up to version 1.01 with a large array of expanded features.
Developed to ease the process of developing a range of CMS applications for business purposes, Imperium offers the following features: Read the rest of this entry »
