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How was this website constructed? |
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Written by Daniel Hienzsch
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Monday, 04 June 2007 |
I've spent quite a bit of time on the creation of this website. The first consideration I had was ease of maintenance. In the past, I've tried to handcode everything from scratch and, while having it's merits in terms of atomic control over each element, it really is far to time consuming. That was the primary barrier to entry for building this site initially.
I found the Joomla! content management system and played with it a
little bit. The item that wowed me the most, at first, was the
templating system. The ability to swap out the entire look and feel floored me. Subsequent to that, I've really come to
love the flexibility of the interface, the HUGE variety of 3rd party
extension, modules, components, etc and the very active open source
user community.
When I finally came across the RocketTheme Template Club, I was finally
hooked. Not only are the interfaces as modern as it gets in terms of
look and feel, but the templates all validate XHTML and CSS out of the
box. Like Joomla! in general, RocketTheme specifically, has a large
user community and some fantastic moderators who answer questions and
direct your support requests efficiently. All that for a simple annual
membership fee.
As you can imagine, I'm very impressed with the combination of Joomla! and RocketTheme.
The site is currently built as follows...
Server:
- Shared hosting through HostGator running on a LAMP stack. Joomla!
and Gallery2 installed via Fantastico.
Extensions:
Gallery2 (Matrix Theme Embedded)Gallery2 Bridge- joomGallery
- MultiThumb with Slimbox activated
- RokLatest Module
- Monoslideshow
- Several custom HTML modules
- Joomap
- OpenSEF
Custom Development:
- Extensive
integration of design elements from BentoBox Dark Style 2 into
Colormatic Style 14. Nearly all typographical elements have been
reproduced as well as addition of the "-hilite" module suffixes.
- Replaced
default Mootools .js supplied from RocketTheme with custom built .js
file from the Mootools site, allowing use of control panel and
RokLatest if I wanted (I don't want right now though). Final template
only relies on Mootools v1.1 for all Ajax'y features.
Deep customization of "Matrix" Gallery2 theme to allow the embedding to match the site.- Added "photo" span class to alerts. (example on first page of any journal article)
- Added "open" and "close" gif files to most recent version of RokLatest
- Customized the default CSS within joomGallery to make it match the BentoBox Dark Style 2 feel of the site.
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Last Updated ( Friday, 09 January 2009 )
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