Skip navigation
Tyssen Design — Brisbane Freelance Web Developer
(07) 3300 3303

Blog Articles

CMS Review: Processwire

By John Faulds /

Here at Tyssen Design, we're big fans of ExpressionEngine and use it for a lot of our work, but it's not always the right fit for every project, so over the last year or so we've been testing out a few alternative content management systems, some of which we've reviewed before.

Today, we're going to look at Processwire, which has been on our radar for a while. It touts its main features as all custom fields, an easy-to-use jQuery-inspired API, and a powerful selector engine. It was chosen as CMS Critic's best free CMS for 2012, and we know a few people who use it and swear by it, and it's also come up occasionally in comparisons with ExpressionEngine, all reasons which made us want to try it out.

More on CMS Review: Processwire

Get yourself mobile — it’s not as difficult as you think

By John Faulds /

Mobile Internet is massive in Australia; we have nearly 9 million smart phone users, approximately 37% of the population, making us the second most smart phone-friendly nation in the world. More than 2 million Australians use their mobile phone to access the Internet each month (Roy Morgan Research), with more than half doing product searches. In fact, research from Google indicates more than 40% of shopping-related enquiries come from mobile devices, but less than one third of small businesses have a mobile-friendly site.

More on Get yourself mobile — it’s not as difficult as you think

Relaunch Special

By John Faulds /

To celebrate the relaunch of the site, we're running a special during September. Anyone who books any type of work, whether it be some site maintenance or updates, a redesign, or a completely new site (feel free to pass the message on to people you know as well) before the end of September will receive a 20% discount (up to a maximum of $500).*

More on Relaunch Special

Have you done something different with the place?

By John Faulds /

Why yes we have, thanks for noticing. After about six years, several attempts including a couple of false starts, and some that only got part of the job done, this site has finally been redesigned. Tyssen Design is now in its third incarnation since having first launched in 2005 (you can see screenshots of the previous two versions below), and the biggest changes are making the site mobile friendly (which has come to be known as Responsive Web Design), completely overhauling and enhacing the portfolio, pushing the boundaries of what can be done with CSS instead of images, and finally making the whole thing run on ExpressionEngine (EE).

More on Have you done something different with the place?

I’ve got a new blog!

By John Faulds /

It's been a while since I wrote anything on this blog and it's possible that this may be the last post here because from now on I intend to do most of my writing at my new blog. This site is due for a redesign but the first part in that strategy involved setting up a new site. If that doesn't make much sense, please read the first post on the new site in which I explain my reasoning.

I'm not ruling out entirely ever writing articles on this site in the future, but it won't be until after the site has been redesigned and I don't have an exact timeline for that right now. So in the meantime, if you've bookmarked or subscribed to the feed for this site, you might like to do the same for the new one too.

Adding a link list to TinyMCE with ExpressionEngine

By John Faulds /

Yesterday I was working on the planning of a new site to be built with ExpressionEngine and was wondering about the best way to let editors link to other entries from within the body of an entry they're creating or editing. ExpressionEngine doesn't have this sort of functionality built into it by default so I asked on Twitter to find out if anyone knew of any add-ons that had been created that might do this.

Redesigning ExpressionEngine sites

By John Faulds /

With ExpressionEngine you give your clients a lot of power and flexibility to update the content of their own site, but at some point in a site's life there's going to come a time when changes will be required that the site owner or his/her staff can't do themselves via the control panel. Changes to a logo or other graphical elements of the site, adding new sections or functionality, giving the site a new 'skin' or theme, or completely rebuilding from the ground up will require a designer of developer to get involved.

Web design ‘pre-flight’ checklist

By John Faulds /

Over the years of being a freelance web designer, I've been developing my own processes for the business of designing websites. One of those processes has been compiling a list of tasks that need to be completed before launching a website, whether it be a new site or a redesign. This list is kept in a spreadsheet which I work through, ticking off each item after the client has given final sign off for the site to go live. I view it as my final quality control procedure and I usually find that the process will highlight a few of the 'little things' that I might have overlooked in general development. Usually nothing too major; more a case of 'dotting all the Is and crossing all the Ts'.

More on Web design ‘pre-flight’ checklist

Calling a Wordpress loop from inside a Wordpress loop

By John Faulds /

Recently I came across a sitution whereby I wanted to call a list of Wordpress posts from inside the body of another post, i.e., not coding it into a template, but embedding into the body of the post itself. Not a big drama, I thought to myself: I already have the exec-php plugin installed to enable the execution of PHP from within Wordpress posts, so all I needed to do was call the Wordpress loop from the point inside the post where I wanted my list of links to appear, e.g.: