DIY Swimming Pools by Polypool

Following on from the recent release of the utopia 365 designed and developed Polypool website, comes the newly launched DIY Swimming Pools website.

As you can see below, it shares a common(ish) look to the main Polypool company website, but with a few twists, additions and things (that’s a technical term that is).

We’re sharing common content between the two sites as part of our "Polypool Shared” project, within both associateMe and Rails directly.

Here it is.... almost as lovely as the main Polypool site from last month!

utopian concept

There's always lots going on in utopia, but as so many development firms know it's vital to maintain free flowing creativity. Once in a while we like to sit back and write something ‘fun’.

We have been developing our Ruby on Rails CMS system (associateMe) recently, with the addition of some fantastic gallery modules which are so simple to implement and manage.

There is a lovely system for uploading large images, and then producing various sized versions for use within the webpage (in what we call media blocks). These media blocks can be various sizes so we simply centre on the image to get the best fit. This works most of the time, but if an image is uploaded where we want the top area viewed we run into a problem as the image used is centred.

eg. We upload this image:

But we're using a letterbox view area on our webpage so we end up with this:

The normal solution is to edit the image offline by cropping the area we want to be viewed, then uploading and using in our media blocks....but, that's not smart enough for us...

Recently Andy has been working on a concept to allow us to control what areas of an image are viewed on a webpage.

This means we can end up with this:

If implemented into associateMe, will not only prove very useful for our general associateMe users, but hugely useful for our soon to be released eCommerce module for associateMe.

Enough words and pictures though, video demos are always much nicer!

Image Manipulation in Browser from utopia 365 on Vimeo.