JISCMail.ac.uk launched!

My biggest project yet is live since Tuesday morning. I have been wanting to do a site that is content heavy for a while as most of my previous sites have been quite small for the likes or artists or DJs. JISCMail is a service the is based on LSoft’s Listserv to run mailing lists and is the National Academic Mailing List Service.
This project has allowed me to play with various frameworks that I had not used before. The first framework that I used was josh clayton’s blueprint which I found fantastic. Blueprints meant that I did not have too worry about floating dividers, setting a size for a container nor create classes for warning, error and success messages.
Another CSS framework to I used was Lwis.net’s drop down menu. I have always found that CSS drop down menus are ridiculously time consuming to make especially if you want you menu to be compatible with all browsers.
I was also introduced to the Zend Lucene php framework which allowed me to index all the files in my site. Indexing a site was something that I was unfamiliar with. I did find very frustrating to come up with a way to index the files as it was something I addressed towards the end of making the site. However, after finding a couple of good tutorials online I soon had indexed every page. Once the files where indexed, making a search page was very easy, allowing me to easily search exact matches or phrases.
When I started this site I had only ever made the most minimalistic of javascript scripts. However since the making of this site I have become quite accustomed to using jquery and also implemented an html editor with thanks to ECKditor. CKEditor really impressed me as it took so little time to implement and could edit XHTML (something I did not find any other web based HTML editor could).