Silicon Chisel » joomla

NewOrleans.com

Silicon Chisel — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 17:55:25 +0000

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.

JoGadgets

Silicon Chisel — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Something new and cool for the Joomla CMS to keep an eye out for is JoGadgets. A collection of AJAX plug-ins to jazz up your portal.

Joomla goes Hollywood … www.ltnla.com

Mark Miller — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

LTN is a new local interest TV network for the Los Angeles area. With 9 shows broadcasting new episodes each week there’s a lot of content. The content team has 6 people creating articles and media. I chose Joomla as our CMS foundation for the site.

Some details:

Running Joomla 1.04
Template based on Jamboworks Global Biz
Uses SEF Advance

Custom modules for hooking up with phpadsnew (4 zones, sensitive to the branch of the site)
Custom modules for “home page” and “side bar” videos – these tie into a
broadcast database and video library which was also custom coded
Custom module for showing the daily schedule on the home page
Custom module for linking out to “Adult Content” … this brings up an age
verification dialog before proceding to the link (you can download this
from SF).

The site has been up for less than two months and already has over
550 articles of content and 250 clips of FLV video. It’s currently up
to about 1000 visitors and 35000 pages per day in traffic. I built the
whole deal in about 6 weeks.

Adult Content Mambot

Silicon Chisel — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 21:00:00 +0000

This weekend I’m releasing a little Mambot for Joomla/Mambo that I built for a project at a TV station. It’s intended for sites which need to link out to adult content and puts up an age verification dialog before proceding to the link. The code is a little basic, there is no nice control panel to set the text for the pop-up. That can all be edited in the files – this needed to be done in a hurry so niceties were left for later.

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