Brian is a personal friend and asked me to share just how I built this site and what extensions I used. My wife Michelle and I knew up front we wanted it to be simple to use. Too often people think that the more features, the better. This is not true. Less is more. Just look at Google's home page. Sweet and simple was the key.
I remember the first time I showed the web site to Brian. He did not like the fact that we have the recipe categories on the home page. Some of you may agree with Brian, but we feel as though it is the focus of the site and should be up front. We understand that some people may never navigate to any other area of the site, but we are okay with that.
Under the hood
Template:
Pinboard by YooTheme.com
We used a number of extensions to pull this off.
K2 from joomlaworks.gr
Before starting the web site, I knew that I was going to need something other than com_content to get the look I wanted. I looked at a couple of options and decided that K2 was the best choice for my needs.
This is used on the Recipes section of the web site. It's hard to try to decide which features should be discussed, but that would turn this blog post into a "cool things about K2" blog post. Just know that the site would not have turned out as good as it did without the use of K2.
This is the premier form building component for Joomla. We are using this on the Suggest a Recipe and Contact Us pages.
I've been a fan of JCE for years. Ryan Demmer has done a great job at providing the best Editor for Joomla. This extension is used for administrative purposes and is not visible to the end user.
This extension is one of the best things to happen to Joomla. It allows you to create backups of your site. Furthermore, they have an application called JoomlaPack Remote that allows you to perform automatic backups from your MS Windows desktop. I currently have it set up to create and download a backup of the web site every night.
This facilitates the forum functionality of the web site.
Written by follow Joomla Leadership Team member Samuel Moffatt, this component allows you to easily upgrade your Joomla website to the latest version.
I also wrote various modules on the right side of the web site. If you are interested in knowing more about any of them, just let me know.
Hacks
I'm not afraid to say that I did make some modifications to K2. Just so people looking at the site are not mislead into thinking that some of the features are currently part of K2's core package. Aside from styling changes, I'll list the rest:
Watermarks
Ths feature is coming to K2… soon actually. Being impatient, I added the feature myself. An Intolerant Offspring watermark is added to all recipe images automatically during the upload process.
Advance Search
I wanted the ability to search by Category and Tag as well. To our knowledge, we are the only food intolerance site that allows you to search by multiple food allergies. Technically this was not a hack, since I did not edit any K2 files. I leveraged the MVC framework by writing my own Model, View, and Controller for "advsearch" and "advsearchresults".
Lytebox
It did not display exactly how I wanted, so I fixed that.
Logged in to Add Comments, but anyone can view.
Currently, you can turn comments on and off depending on if a user is logged in or not, however you can not show comments to all users, but restrict commenting to logged in users. This was actually a simple hack to do.
There were a couple of other little hacks/bug fixes but I will not go into those because they have either been added or fixed in K2s core package. Most of you will probably not notice them anyway as they are small items.
Conclusion
Overall, we feel like we nailed it when it comes to what we were trying to achieve.
If you have food allergies, please consider visiting our site often or subscribing to our RSS feed (recipes only).
If you know someone with food allergies, please send them a link to Intolerant Offspring (http://intolerantoffspring.com).