My name is Magnus and I’m studying to be a web developer at TUC, Tranås Education Centre. The last seven weeks I have had an internship at Angry Creative. My task was to integrate a webmail program, Roundcube, into their customer portal using Wordpress and PHP. To complicate things further, Wordpress runs as a network of different sites, Wordpress Network. This means that you administer a number of different sites from the same Wordpress installation.
I must admit that I was, perhaps not worried, but still a little unsure of how it would all go and how I would go about solving the problem.
At the beginning of the internship, I spent a lot of time working remotely due to lack of space in the old premises that Angry Creative shared with another company. This meant that I could only be on site on Wednesdays. After about half the time, they moved to new premises and I was able to be on site every day.
Because of this, the first few days were a soft start with setting up SmartGit, a version control programme, as well as looking at simple Wordpress plugins so I would get an idea of how it works in the Wordpress world. When I arrived on site for the first time on Wednesday, I was given a crash course in how email works by my supervisor, Mattias “Plux” Stahre. I had no idea that it was as advanced as it really is.
Anyway, we proceeded to set up an installation of Roundcube on my laptop. After I got to know the programme a bit, we tackled the problem. I already had Wordpress installed on my computer after taking a short course in web publishing at TUC.
The first step was to create a new tab in the Wordpress menu that showed the actual login box to Roundcube. This was not so advanced, so I managed it fairly quickly.
Since I had never made a plugin for Wordpress before, I made my own little plugin just to get a feel for it, with all the “hooks” and “actions” that you should use to get Wordpress to recognise your own functions.
Once that was done, I started adding all the different text fields, checkboxes and dropdown lists needed to configure Roundcube. This took some time, as there was a whole pile of settings that should all be processed by Wordpress. After this, the work began to get these settings to be saved in Wordpress’ own database. This is where the problems started to arise.
I dug into various guides on how to manage settings for WPMU and read Wordpress’s own documentation to try to get on with my problem. After a few hours, everything worked! Hooray. But this only meant that all settings could be edited and saved in Wordpress. These settings have nothing to do with Roundcube. Yet… Phew.
When you configure Roundcube for the first time, the programme generates two text areas with configuration settings. One for settings such as server, port and the like and one for database settings. When you have made your settings, you should then copy all the text that Roundcube generates and create your own config files. “Plux” found this less convenient so he simply wanted to create the files automatically every time you change any setting. Here he had to step in and assist with his expertise, so after a while everything worked as intended. When “Plux” was satisfied with the functionality, I started testing things thoroughly. After some minor bug fixing and a number of test installations, it seems that the plugin works as it should.
I’d say I’m happy with the result considering I don’t have much experience. Of course, I have encountered problems along the way and I have learnt a lot. Finally, I want to say thank you for having me here. I have had seven very educational and enjoyable weeks at Angry Creative. Hopefully I will see you more in the future!