Website facelift and under the hood support

[karlos]

I've gotten a few comments on the "new look." The NC3 website is now organized and managed by a Content Management System (CMS) Joomla. This is free, open source software which I installed on our site. There were a few reasons I did this:

• The static pages, so nicely designed by Mike Santoro, were difficult to expand to add new features and new navigation buttons without a lot of programming or an expensive software package. The NC3 header was also large and took up a lot of real estate, so that you often had to page down to see page content.
• The monthly updates to the website required manually editing html pages and uploading to the website - not too hard but it usually took 1-2 hrs per month to keep everything in order
• The manual updates, without using an expensive software package (although I did use the free NVu, aka kompozer), were somewhat difficult to maintain a consistent look and feel across the website. Previous webmasters used Microsoft Front Page, Adobe Go Live, and Adobe Dreamweaver - I did not want the next webmaster (or the club) to have to spend money on an expensive software package for our site.
• It takes a geek (or semi-geek) to maintain the site as a set of static html pages. It shouldn't be that hard. I wanted to set up the site so that anyone could take it over someday without either specialized software or a PhD in computer science.
• It was fun to learn something new...

The Joomla CMS easily addressed all of the issues to make our site much more easy to maintain and expand in the future:

• The main pages you see and navigate to are no longer static html pages. The "pages" you see are created on the fly as you click each navigation button. Each "page" refers to a "category" in a database. Each category (i.e. page) is a series of articles, also stored in the database. For example, the Roadies page is the "Roadies" category in the database and the "articles" in the database are "Saturday Regular Rides", "Saturday Long Rides", "Sunday Rides", etc. You just specify the order of the articles and Joomla takes care of laying it out across the page in a format dictated by a template. A side benefit is data integrity and history - since all content is maintained in a database, complete history of all edits, going back forever, exists. Also, daily database backups by our hosting service, ensures the data is never hosed, although I keep a mirror on my laptop to combat Murphy.
• The monthly updates can now more easily be done with any browser (and the administration password  ). You just open up an article in a browser window to edit and you have an edit interface much like Microsoft Word. Just copy and paste ride info from ride leaders, save, and that part of the website is updated. Previously I kept a mirror of the site on my laptop so that I could, in a pinch, update the website while on travel but this is much simpler.
• There is only one style template for the CMS setup of the NC3 site. Therefore, all the pages are very consistent. In fact, I can just change a pointer to a new template and the site will look completely different, but all the pages and articles will be the same. It only takes ~5 sec to completely change the look for anyone who wishes to do so. Caution... during the transition the main effort was in adjusting a default template to add graphics and background so that the site would look somewhat familiar and retain some of the cool aspects of Mike's original design. Template design is one of the more laborious tasks behind a good CMS, but our site is simple enough that it was only a few hours.
• Anybody can now maintain the website. In fact, the next web person might primarily keep the required software up to date - Joomla and Simple Machines Forum (this message board), maintain mail forwarders and ftp areas. The webmaster could give specific people passwords to edit "articles" for which they own - for example, the Spokey Dokes ride coordinator could update the areas on the Spokey Dokes page directly without an intermediate hand-off. For the time being, these things are unnecessary, but it does make it possible for more of a "group" maintenance of the website.
  

Someone commented that now our site "looks like all other sites." Using a CMS is what a lot of other websites have done (some even use Joomla, but there are other alternatives, including expensive commercial software for the real pros). The corporate website where I work is a huge CMS and, for all the reasons I stated above, as a CMS it is much easier to maintain a consistent look and feel and to distribute website content responsibility over a large group of people.

If anyone has any problems with page displays, links, etc. please reply here. I know Frank Dumville had some issues with Internet Explorer 8 (still under construction by Microsoft, in my opinion), but I installed a patch which makes IE8 display nicely. Judy Frankel reported some links which worked in a funny fashion due to a mixture of the new Joomla content and external links. The site has been tested on several browsers: firefox, safari (mac), chrome, and IE6,7,8 (the only glitches occurred with Internet Explorer - go figure...). The two little validation buttons (CSS and XHTML) at the bottom right of each page ensure that page is standards-compliant, meaning any standards-compliant browser should not have a problem (in theory, sigh) displaying the pages. My personal preference is firefox - page display is snappy and there are some really cool add-ons which help me both at work and play. I don't think firefox has ever displayed pages weirdly while, when I was previously editing the static html pages, making them look right in Internet Explorer (any version) was always an adventure (another issue which I hope is gone forever).