The theme features custom WordPress plugins, the first based upon Keith Wood’s jQuery Countdown, a Twitter widget and a Campaign Monitor signup widget. I’m hugely impressed with WordPress and look forward to building more custom plugins for the platform.

Keeping in the theme of open source, the new website will be driven by Magento, and will be due to launch on the 1st April 2010.

As a Microsoft developer of over 10 years (ASP through to ASP.NET 3.5) I’ve not really had a chance to get my hands dirty with the many open source platforms out there (which are predominantly PHP/MySQL Based). Over the years, I’ve developed a broad range of web applications from the ground up on the .NET framework, from vehicle tracking platforms to custom content management and e-commerce systems, but over the last 6 months I have been researching and getting myself very familiar with a number of open source platforms, including Wordpress, Drupal and the Magento Ecommerce platform.

Open source platforms benefit from the input of a huge development community, constantly improving the software. Out of the box, Wordpress is a powerful blogging platform, providing loads of functionality as a result of 1000’s of man-hours development from the word go. Developing such a comprehensive feature set from the ground up would very likely be expensive, and in most cases beyond the means of the most wanting to set up a blog from scratch.

Open source platforms have matured and gone are the days of endless hacking to shoehorn functionality in to an existing system. Plugins and extensions have been developed to broaden the feature set of Wordpress and Magento, and developers can extend open source by writing their own plugins using the often intuitive frameworks upon which these platforms are based.

There are several issues to consider when deciding to use open source over custom software which are beyond the scope of this blog, which is really just a nod towards the hard work of the open source community. I will certainly be considering the open source approach for projects in the future and am looking forward to getting stuck in to Magento for a big project in 2010.

The microsite features a custom CMS giving Sue Ryder Care staff the ability to update the walks via a secure administration system.

The website design was provided by Sue Ryder Care, I was responsible for the front and back-end build, using XHTML, CSS and jQuery, propped up by ASP.NET (C#) and  SQL Server 2008 on the back end.

So, it’s on a really high note that I have decided to leave Bourn Design. Over the last few months I’ve been developing an itch that I just can’t scratch. I’m a developer at heart and I have recently struggled to get my hands as dirty as I would like on some of the development projects that have been passing through the studio.

So I’m going to scratch that itch and return to freelancing, and hopefully get a chance to spend a bit of time on the things that make me tick. Mark will be taking over the reins at Bourn Design, and I am confident that he is going to continue what we both started and absolutely smash it.

All the best to Mark, Cate and the rest of the guys at Bourn Design. A big thanks to all of our clients who we have worked with over the last 2 years and all the best for the new year – let’s hope it’s a good one.