Daniel J Beck

Calendars and I have a long standing relationship with each other. I've programmed my own calendaring system about four times now and each time I get to improve upon it. This latest calendar was built to run a timeline with generalized dates and events. It was pretty exciting to see it take shape. The project specifications required it to work on a touch screen that didn't have a mouse or keyboard so it needed a simple interface and layers of information that could be interacted with via mouse hover and by click. The project was a huge success.

You can see the results on the World Council of Credit Unions' website at http://www.woccu.org/events/timeline.

I developed a mass email system, much like phpList, for World Council of Credit Unions (WOCCU) as one of my first projects for them 5 years ago. It was developed to manage email lists that can cross pollinate in our custom content management system (CRM). One thing that was overlooked and disregarded was what to do with bounced emails. Previously, it was the responsibility of the sender to clean the lists but that was ineffective and slow. To fix this issue I took some development time and created a system that went into a shared bounce email account, grabbing all the bounced emails and applying various flags to contacts in the CRM. The system manages to figure out why an email bounced (no small feat), as well as what mass email created the issue and which contacts should be fixed.

Finally, I got to expand my Credit Card Processing Class to handle actual items and shipping and taxes! It has just been doing donations for non-profits for so long. I created a basic cart class which I serialize into a cookie so people can shop, leave, come back and continue without worries. Then I made a little front end to the cart so people could update quantity and styles of products, apply coupons and check out. Works pretty good. Now if the site owner can figure out the SSL we can make it live. I've got so many other things I could use these classes on. As a bonus, I got to drag out my really old (php 4) form validation class I wrote and upgrade the heck out of it. Works so much more cleanly now. The one I normally use is owned by my current employer and uses so many other systems that it just gets a bit confusing at times. This one is really straight forward, but with room to grow for sure.

At The World Council of Credit Unions, there are many subsites with new ones being requested regularly. After creating each one by hand it occured to me that an admin that did all the set up for me would be useful for a few reasons. First, it would save me time. Each site requires me to create a lot of soft links around the webserver as well as creating configuration files for Apache and then finally to create database entries so that staff could add pages to the newly formed subsite. Secondly, it would reduce errors with that creation process. There were too many places for someone to forget a comma or link. Now with this admin, it became a couple clicks to create and verify a subsite.