The Page Editor is my most recent accomplishment at Truman, and my favorite at the moment. Words and screen grabs won't do it justice, so I've created an 11MB demo video to take you through the process of creating a new page on a Truman site. The video is about 4 minutes long. Enjoy!
TruTube is an internal-use-only video conversion and storage solution that I developed for Truman State University. Despite the availability of similar tools like YouTube, there was demand for something private but equally reliable, so instructors could embed videos in Blackboard for their internet-supplemented courses without the entire world having access to view them.
TruTube places every video it receives into a queue, and will convert up to two at a time into a format that plays successfully on any iPod or iPhone.
Playlists can also be created from the bank of media in a person's account. They can be embedded on any Truman site, and podcasts are also available to ease iPod/iPhone syncronization.
Truman Web Interface Builder is difficult to classify, as its function is to facilitate web application development by simplifying or eliminating repetitive coding tasks. It's more of a framework or API than an application.
An organization like Truman has a multitude of departments with their own unique needs, and requests for custom web applications to meet these needs are frequent. TruWIB makes development of these applications quick and easy, but the real boon is the attractive and powerful interface applied to them "for free." Pagination, searching, column sorting, multi-record deletion, form validation, and export to Excel are all present without the developer having to write any logic whatsoever.
I also wrote lengthy technical documentation for it, and have made it available in its entirety on the left.
Leaves CMS is a project I began in my free time in the summer of 2009 as an alternative to WordPress MU. Around this time there was some discussion at Truman about whether we should try moving our entire site onto a single WPMU installation, so it came to be that by day I would sit at work testing WPMU to see if it would fit our needs, and by night I was writing my own content management system that already did what we needed.
In the end, I found and documented enough issues with WPMU that the department agreed it was not an ideal fit. Because we had bigger fish to fry we decided to postpone any large scale migration attempts indefinitely, and the beginning of the Fall semester saw an end to my free time and thus the development of Leaves CMS. By that time, however, I had already replicated and improved upon most of WordPress's base functionality. Unlike WPMU, Leaves was able to create and share content across multiple sites with ease, anything could be commented on, and comments themselves could be nested.
This Photo Gallery tool replaced an older system we needed to manually install on all sites that needed it—any bug fixes or feature additions would likewise need to be manually rolled out, and eventually we ended up with numerous "branches" and iterations of the code littered about our web servers.
The new gallery application I wrote removed these shortcomings by allowing a single set of files to serve every Truman site using a virtual directory. In addition, I made improvements to the user interface and visual presentation.
Kirksville Rocks has been the best resource for information on live music events around Kirksville for several years. One summer I was approached with the opportunity to rewrite the site from the ground up in PHP as a WordPress plugin, as the original backend was beginning to develop problems. Further, they wanted to extend the site's reach to cover other types of live performances.
Do a Google search for Magic 8-Ball. I'll wait here. Notice how all web-based Magic 8-Balls are terrible?
It was this very problem that led me to write this little toy. A friend submitted the artwork, and within a couple hours, it was done.
Why showcase something so basic here? Sometimes, a little polish is all that's needed to make a simple concept shine, and such a keen eye is something I bring to every project I undertake.