Naga Jolokia, also know as the ‘ghost chilli’, is widely considered the hottest chilli known to man, and in fact when handling in bulk it’s advised that “breathing apparatus, gloves and appropriate clothing should be worn”. And if that isn’t a recommendation to try something, then I don’t know what is.

Obviously plenty of people do indeed want to test the integrity of their digestive systems, as an initial product test on eBay has been hugely successful. I’ve been in discussions with the company and should be producing a new website for them soon, with the aim of spreading the chilli madness to as wide an audience of masochists as possible.

It’s great to be involved with something that promotes a good cause and REOC provides a wealth of useful information on clean energy
initiatives in Cornwall, both at a business and domestic level. Cornwall location and geography offers such a unique environment for taking advantage of a vast array of renewable tecnologies, and hopefully the website will help promote REOC’s aim to establish Cornwall as a leading example of practical implementation of these technologies, and a source of expert knowledge for the industry.

In terms of functionality, site visitors can register to receive updates, or make paid contributions to get more closely involved in the future direction of the group and gain exposure for their own organisations in a Cornwall renewable technology business directory. I decided to use a combination of Drupal, it’s e-commerce package Ubercart, and a community module called Userpoints to acheive these goals, and on the whole I think this combination worked out very well. Members are awarded site credits on payment of their member subscription, which can then be used for posting a defined number of blog entries or other content on the site.

Ubercart in particular is an awesome set of modules, offering a very high level of customisation and options. This is the second time I have used it and the developers and community behind it are always on hand to solve problems and put a lot of hard work into making it the de facto e-commerce solution for Drupal.

Go take a look at the new site here.

I was delighted to be given the opportunity to contribute to their ongoing success. With a website already in place, but not being done justice by their separate blog hosted at free providers blog.co.uk, the time was right for them to move to a more powerful blogging system which would actually help their main site do better in Google.

Enter WordPress, and after copy/pasting 100+ articles by hand (like many free-hosted blog services, blog.co.uk doesn’t feature tools such as XML exports which allow you to easily move all your posts from one blog system to another – although it should be noted WordPress.com is a free service which includes this!), Honeybuns had 2 years of blog posts chronicling the highs and lows of their business, within their site domain and set up for easy and relevant indexing by Google.

Integrating WordPress into an existing site is often a good solution for those who want to see the full benefits of a modern CMS system before ditching table based, static sites that many are probably still familiar with. Happily, my custom WordPress theme slipped into the existing code at honeybuns.co.uk without too much trouble, blending well into the existing site. A small but fun project to work on!

Whenever I put together a new theme it’ll be available for download from the WordPress Theme Directory under the free open source/GPL license, and also mentioned here on the blog. You can use these themes for free in any project using WordPress.

The Neonglow theme is now available. A dark, clean and well-balanced theme, it’s suitable for any kind of blog and seems to have been taken up by lots of tech-focussed blogs.

Download the .zip here