It's been a while since I posted anything here but I seem to have some spare time now that I haven't had for a while.
I just completed a site for my synagogue. Along the way I hit numerous bugs or limitations with joomla that I had to find a solution to. This short series of posts will describe the issue and the solution that I adopted.
The site content will be managed by non-experienced users and they will only be updating their section of the web site occasionaly so it was important to me to make it as easy as possible for them. I might have built the web site for them but I really dont want to be answering emails and calls for the next three years on how to do something. After all this was a pro-bono site and I've invested enough of my time and money into building the site already.
The content on the site comes from just two components - the Joomla core com_content and JEvents. The site also has quite a complex ACL setup as sadly its not possible in today's society for a Jewish organisation to publicise activities - even if they are just a knitting or book reading group.
In the coming days I will be publishing blog posts on how I addressed the following issues.
- Coming Soon - an attractive page for the site whilst I was building it
- Creating a distraction free template when editing content
- Simplifying the front end content creation form to only have the fields that they require
- Sending users an email when their account has been authorised
- Creating a list of a users own content so they can easily find and update their content
- Adding a series of How-to articles and videos
- Creating an override to use the same image for the blog and the full article
The solutions I adopted might be new to you. Many of them have been published elsewhere but you didn't know about them. Some of them could probably be improved. Perhaps some of them can even be adopted in to the next release of Joomla.
They worked for me, they might work for you as well.
