myPlymouth: Thanksgiving Theme
November 28, 2007 | 3 Comments
Thursday before Thanksgiving, users of the myPlymouth portal at Plymouth State were greeted by an altered header graphic similar to that of the Halloween theme I had done for the previous month.
This one, however, changed daily for 9 days. Here’s the sequence:
Friday:
Saturday:
Sunday:
Monday:
Tuesday:
Wednesday:
Thursday (The flames flickered ever so slightly):
Friday - Monday:
Now, once I finished that final graphic Dan approached me and made a funny request. He wanted a special little violent ending for himself. The thought of a custom final header for a few sketchy people sounded fun…so I obliged with this header that showed for a mere 5 people on campus:
In addition to the internal alteration of the header, I did another alteration on the login page for the Tuesday and Wednesday before as well as the Thursday of Thanksgiving. My pal, the turkey, showed up in place of the random image. Here he is:
Overall, the header was well received be the campus feuling my desire to come up with something nifty for the coming holidays! A special thanks to Ken, Zach, and Dan for giving good content suggestions and allowing me to bounce ideas off them!
myPlymouth: Halloween Theme
November 2, 2007 | 4 Comments
As I alluded to on my last post, on Halloween, Zach, Dan, and I unveiled a new feature in Plymouth State University’s portal. Plymouth State will begin customizing the myPlymouth logo and/or the entire header withing the portal.
Using some snazzy CSS easter-egg functionality combined with some PHP, we can dynamically alter the look of the portal and target customizations to the entire campus, groups of people, or individuals. On Halloween, we customized and targeted the entirety of our user population with the following header theme. We changed this:
To this:
The Halloween theme was a surprise to the campus and received a number of good reviews and comments! The theme didn’t reduce the portal’s functionality, it simply gave it a nice candy coating to add a little flair. Overall, I’m pretty happy with the layout (which is actually made up of 7 images). Due to the excitement around the Halloween theme, the campus can be sure that more are coming!
As I mentioned before, targeting the entire campus is doable along with targeting groups of people and individuals. Needless to say the targeting capabilities of this can be exploited by…well…by me. And I’ve had some fun exploiting it, too! Here’s a couple of fun ones that I targeted at specific users:
This header was targeted at my manager, Ken:
This one is targeted at Dee:
Here’s one that I targeted at Dan and Zach:
Fun times. So far, Dan, Zach, and I have some pretty sexy ideas for what can be done…ranging from minor tweaks to the logo (similar to the goofy ones I did above), to fully customized headers (like the Halloween one), all the way to full blown themes that customize a larger portion of myPlymouth. I look forward to getting creative with what I can draw and implement.
