First up is a new WordPress website for our friend Rich Simmons over at Art is the Cure.  Rich needed the ability to pull content from the wide range of platforms he uses to spread the word about the AITC movement.  We decided to take advantage of WordPress for this, applying a really cool custom skin to the site to compliment the vast amount of information we pull in using a range of off the shelf and custom plugins. Check it out at http://www.artisthecure.com.

Next up is Educating Together.  Educating Together is a brand new start up offering the highest quality resources and advice to parents to ensure that their children flourish at school.  The site was a custom designed bespoke build using the latest Microsoft technologies including ASP.Net 4.0 MVC with a SQL 2008 database.  We’ve also used jQuery and Flash to provide a neat and easy to navigate user experience.  If you have children in school we highly recommend that you check it out at https://www.educatingtogether.co.uk/.

Check back soon for more updates on the amazing new projects we’re currently working on…

UPDATE:  In IIS 7.5 it’s now possible to implement nice looking URLs for your WordPress blog with the built in rewrite functionality.  Check here for more details.

One issue we couldn’t find an easy way around was the implementation of pretty Permalinks for our blog.  What’s a pretty Permalink we hear you ask?  By default a WordPress blog post would have the Permalink http://atlascs.co.uk/blog/?p=N.  This is both impossible to understand and not very useful.  Whereas we wanted our Permalinks to be far more readable to the human eye, and include information regarding what the blog post is about.  This is also useful for SEO purposes but that’s an entirely separate discussion.

The usual approach to implement this functionality is the use of a .htaccess file but this is only applicable to Apache. We’re running our website on Windows Server so this isn’t an option.

After hunting around for a simple solution we finally found one by Einar Egilsson.

To implement this solution follow these simple steps:

1. Take this file, and put it in the root of your WordPress site (rename .txt to .php)
2. Set your sites 404 page to point to the wordpress-404.php URL.  Most control panels at web hosts allow you to do this. If you’ve got the option to select between FILE and URL then choose URL.
3. Go to Options -> Permalinks in your WordPress admin page, and choose an appropriate structure for your links.  We chose Custom with this pattern:

   /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

Simples!  Your WordPress posts will now display with easy to read Permalinks and your site will be much easier to navigate.  We use this solution on a number of our sites including this blog, our Business Rate Relief site and Software Development website.

Enjoy!