New website - the technical stuff

For those couples out there of a technical mind, or for those others who crawl around photography-related websites; all who want to know a bit about the techie stuff behind the scenes read more...

 

The site is built using a well-known and free resource known as Joomla!. Joomla! is a free web site and content management system that has been growing followers for many years. Joomla! is a framework of software components, modules, plug-ins and templates, many of them built and supported by individual developers who depend on donations to keep going. But not every developer working on Joomla! tools is the 21st century equivalent of the struggling artist and one company, Rocket Theme have built a very nice little business thank-you-very-much, based on the subscription model, building template sites for Joomla!

 

This site is based on RT's Panacea template, a 960 grid-based model (http://960.gs) which means that the width of the usable amount of screen real-estate is 960 pixels; the remaining screen estate is used for background. The custom look took about 2 - 3 weeks work, including the learning curve and most of that went into the Home page.

 

The other item of real software is SlideShow Pro, a licenced suite of tools for publishing images in a slide-show player. For the technically-minded (and if you're reading this you should be) I use Slideshow Pro Director, SlideShow Pro for Flash, Thumbgrid 2.0 and SlideShow Pro for Lightroom. SSP provides an image library and server (Director) which publishes shows based on selected content. The content is rendered on-the-fly to the target player and includes audio if so desired.

 

The Home page uses both Thumbgrid 2 and SSP for Flash to render an engaging, interactive show. Viewers can click on thumb images in the background and they'll render on the Flash player in foreground.

 

Everything else is either the standard RT Panacea template or one or more RT modules or Joomla! modules. An important feature of the RT template is its ability to display the site on mobile devices, particularly the iPhone/iTouch and Android devices and this capability is enhanced by SSP's newly introduced features to enable full slide-show features on non-Flash-enabled devices (Apple won't support Flash 'cos its an Adobe product), so the same content can be published to any computing device without prior knowledge of the platform characteristics.

 

As I'm a computing pro as well as a photography pro, I'm well placed to keep up to date with new and exciting developments in the internet space and I hope to keep these coming as the months roll by.

 

Brian

4th October 2010