Silicon Chisel

Last month I completed development work on NewOrleans.com, the site for the city of New Orleans. This was a massive rework of a legacy site, some parts of which had been around for many, many years. The new deployment’s core is the Joomla CMS. Supporting are phpAdsNew for banner ads, Gallery2 for photos, and Simple Machines Forums.

Some details of the work include:

• Mosets Tree used for the directory of hotels, restaurants, and other points of interest.
• A custom module was written to allow the creation of customized search blocks into Mosets. For instance: search restaurants by district.
• Galllery2 was deployed to handle photo galleries.
• Simple Machines Forum was deployed to handle message boards. A module which lists the latest posts is put on Joomla pages where appropriate.
• The Event List component was used to maintain the list of special events in the city, and their venues.
• The site’s existing recipes database was migrated to the Rapid Recipes component .
• About half a dozen custom database converters were built to migrate data held in multiple HyperSeek databases into Joomla.
• The “ad tower” modules on the right side (actually called “Five-to-One” module as it puts five ads in one block … and a subtle Doors reference) connects to phpAdsNew and also takes section and category source tags, so that ad campaigns can be targeted to specific areas of the site.
• A special header banner module was also created to connect to phpAdsNew and uses the same source-tagging logic.
• The prominent Flash Video Channel component is something I wrote. It’s driven by XML files to define the video, text panels, links, and overlay contents. XML files are the most convenient means to manage the data based on past experience, plus it allows easy swapping and scheduling of changes to the channel.