Site History
The first version of Mit Maro Productions, created in 2002-2004, was designed as a project so I could learn HTML. This version used some CSS in the form of inline styles and consisted of only about a dozen pages all of which were poorly designed and looked ugly. Despite how it looked I was happy with what I had achieved and was hungry to go further.
I started reading articles on XHTML and CSS and I started to redesign the site using XHTML and better CSS (no inline styles this time). The result was a site that used Dreamweaver Templates to make updates to the site easier, was 99.9% XHTML valid and used CSS for about 80% of the design. I liked being able to quickly make site wide changes by only changing a single file but Dreamweaver Templates often did not update and I wanted something more reliable for making the site dynamic. So I started looking around.
After doing some reading online for a way to make the pages dynamic, I discovered PHP. I started digging into PHP articles and tutorials and once I had learned the basics of PHP I wrote the next version of Mit Maro Productions which used PHP includes to create a more dynamic site. The result was a site that used CSS nearly entirely for the look and feel of the site and used PHP to make things dynamic. Mit Maro Productions went on the back burner for a while after I implemented this layout and it not until I got a job as a Web Application Developer did I consider redoing the site again.
After my first year in a B.Sc. in Computer Science at Memorial University of Newfoundland I was looking around for a summer job and I stumbled upon Statusfirm Dynamic Media Inc. I some how managed to land a job with the company despite my lack of experience or a formal education in webdesign/programming. This job introduced me too two things; MySQL and the Smarty Template Engine. All of sudden I knew how to separate the content from the design and more importantly the PHP from the XHTML. I quickly started working on a CMS for Mit Maro Productions. After nearly a year of researching, writing code and design a database driven version of Mit Maro Productions was created.
There was however one slight issue with using the Smarty Template Engine and that was speed. Smarty, which was written with PHP 4 in mind, was really starting to show its age. So, I started hunting around for a solution, then a buddy of mine brought to my attention a new template engine called Dwoo. Dwoo was perfect, it was based on Smarty but used the new features of PHP 5 and more importantly runs very fast. Since the last version of the site was aimed towards the code, I decided for this version to focus more on the design of the site. I mocked up a new design and ended up with what you see today.
