Woven Tapestry
Description
Woven Tapestry is my baby. It's really the first real web site I ever went about creating that had a purpose and vision behind it. It started off after I returned from an LDS mission to the Philippines. I had learned there to appreciate my family and wanted to be able to stay in better contact with them. Woven Tapestry's purpose was to allow that. Two classes I took at BYU encouraged me to create the site–"Writing your Personal History" and "Internet Publishing."
Woven Tapestry started off with a simple table-based design and very limited functionality. Family members could create pages about themselves to share with others but in order to do so, they had to send an email to me with the information they wanted, and I created the page by hand. The old web site also featured a very simple discussion board and a few family history stories.
Now, however, Woven Tapestry is a much more complex beast. The design of the page has been redone to separate the content from the presentation. This allows for the page to take on many different looks simply by referencing a different external CSS file. The page weights are also reduced giving faster downloads and using less bandwidth. The different designs of Woven Tapestry and their code can be found at the Skins of Woven Tapestry web page.
PHP also plays a major part of Woven Tapestry now as well. Family members can create their own web pages without having to know HTML or me having to create the page for them. Members simply fill out a form, PHP parses through it, and the end results are saved in a mySQL database which can be viewed later as a web page. Members can also upload pictures to their photo albums to share with others.
Other features of Woven Tapestry include moderated user registration, customized vBulletin Discussion Board, member submitted news on the front page, user-created recipe books, calendar and birthday reminders, a point and rewards system for users to upgrade their accounts, and archives.