We are pleased to announce the launch of the brand-new web site for Heller’s Kitchen!

HK are a local restaurant which provide great food including the amazing cupcakes which you’ll see if you ever pass their window, all cooked on-premises!

The site has been in development for a while but we are now glad to unleash it upon you all :)  The site includes an image gallery and menu pages with a slideshow background, all of which are easily editable using the Joomla 1.5 content management system which it is based upon.

Over the years that we’ve been developing Joomla sites for our clients, for the most part, have rarely needed any functionality that is SO specific that we cannot achieve it by using the core Joomla 1.5 system plus suitable extensions, whether they be modules, components, plugins or a combination of each.

However we recently had the need to create a site which, although it did not have specific functionality needs, did have specific requirements for the nature of the pages and how they would be displayed/edited. Not to go into too much detail but essentially the site will list books, separated into various categories and possibly subcategories, and with a set of custom “fields” to hold the information on each book – ie ISBN, cover image, Publisher and (most specifically for this site) custom links to affiliate sites.

Although this could have been fairly easily achieved by just getting the site owner to type in the information themselves (deleting links to affiliate programs which they didn’t want to use on a book-by-book basis) we wanted to ensure that the site was as easy as possible for the client to update themselves.  Therefore we decided to look into the various CCK components available for Joomla!

In short, CCK stands for Custom Content Kit and it is a component which allows you to define your own types of content, rather than having to use the default Joomla content editor which only allows you to have certain default fields such as Author, Modified Date and one level of Section/Category.  In this case of this development site we also need other fields such as Publisher, ISBN and various links to the affiliates so what we needed was to use a CCK to first define our content type (ie a book) and then to create as many custom fields as we needed so that the client could easily enter the information into these fields, rather than having to hand-type it all.

We investigated just about every CCK that is currently available for Joomla 1.5 including:

• Zoo
• K2
• FlexiContent
• SOBI 2 and finally
• JSeblod

The main features we, as a design and development agency, were looking for were:

1. The ability to create whatever fields and field types we wanted and as many as we wanted
2. The ability to create custom templates for each type of content so that we can completely customise how each content type looks
3. The ability to then make use of the custom fields which we created in the templates we created, wherever and however we wish.
4. The ability to create as many nested levels of sections/categories as we needed
5. Ease of use for the client to administer this new content

Other features which would be desirable:

1. The ability to make use of the core com_content database table (ie the ones which Joomla normally stores the content for pages in so that it would a) ensure ease of migration to future versions of Joomla and b) allow us to make use of the variety of existing extensions for Joomla which act upon this com_content table.  Put simply if the component uses the core tables for storing the bulk of its content then it means we’ll still be able to easily upgrade Joomla in the future and also use various modules etc to display that content.
2. The ability to extend the various field types which make up the system to add in additional custom types (ie MP3 players)

Each system, we found had its own plusses and minuses and it took us several weeks of installing, uninstalling, configuring and testing to settle on the best one.  So which one did we choose?

Check back soon for part two of this post and find out!

The Joomla team announced that they had released the Joomla 1.6 public BETA on the 17^th of May and we have just downloaded it to start investigating what will be on offer on the new version!

1.6 is the first major release since Joomla 1.5 came out back in January 2008 and is more of an evolution of 1.5 rather than a revolution, with several important key features being added to the system in addition to a raft of functional and interface improvements.  The two main new features are :

1. Unlimited section/categories
Actually just unlimited categories, sections are gone altogether.  One of the limitations of Joomla 1.5 was that it only allowed for two levels of categorisation of content, Sections and Categories, and although you could have as many of those as you wished you couldn’t go any further than those two basic levels unless you installed one of several extensions which allowed for this. Now unlimited categories are part of the 1.6 core which allows for far greater flexibilty and organisation of content.

2. ACL (Access Control List)
This is another important addition in Joomla 1.6.  Again, although 1.5 allowed for restricting access to pages, modules and menu items we were restricted to a small set of core levels of access.  Althoguh we could set content to be only for registered users we couldn’t define different types of registered users – ie if you wanted Gold level access which let people view all articles and Silver level access which only allowed access to some of those articles.

As with the sections and categories, thanks to the wonderful Joomla community there were several extensions which could be added onto Joomla 1.5 which would allow for a greater level of control (such as the amazing OSE Access Control which we used on several sites), however ACL is now part of the core.

So what does this mean?  It means that you can set up an unlimited number of access groups for use on your site and define exactly what each of them can do on a per-item basis.  For example if you had a school website you could allow certain users to only update pages for their department and other users to update several department’s pages, or if you are a charity organisation you can allow project workers access to certain parts and site admins to all parts.  The potential is huge.

At this stage the release is still a BETA so is not quite ready for use on production/live sites, however it shouldn’t take too long for the first proper release to come out.  We will continue to investigate and test this new version in advance of its official release so that we can be sure to be amongst the first to be offering Joomla 1.6 websites to all of our clients!

We were recently approached by the owner of the just-launched website Yooni Circle, a website dedicated to student life, who had had their site built by another developer using Joomla 1.5 but who had several issues that their current developer wasn’t able to address.  They therefore wanted us to help them change the configuration and implementation of their site to ensure that it worked in the way they wanted it to and within two days we had their site ready to go with all issues addressed.  We also provided some basic training on the usage of the system.

We are only too happy to assist customers who have existing Joomla sites (1.0 or 1.5) that have been designed and built by other developers, whether that be installing new extensions, configuring existing extensions, recommending extensions to use, adjusting the way the site works (ie for security) and also providing training on how to use the various, often very powerful, features of Joomla 1.5.  We can also patch your site to the latest security release which is an important part of the maintenance of any Joomla site and is highly recommended in order to keep your site secure and stable.

Do you have an existing Joomla website that you would like to change or develop?  If you have then why not get in touch with us to see if we can help?  In order to get the most from any website it should be constantly changed, adjusted and grown and this is easier than ever with Joomla so why not take advantage of it?

We helped Yooni Circle … maybe we can help you too!