The Taggart website has been around awhile and while its last incarnation was perfectly functional, I've been learning Joomla! lately and decided to upgrade it. Joomla is an open source web design platform. What that means is it's free, and even better, it's a kind of modular system that allows you to pick and choose what you want for your site. And many of the designs that you see on Joomla sites are also free and open source.
I started by choosing a new template. Templates are the kind of overall layout of a Joomla site and everything else on the site is built around them. I recently became familiar with a web hosting company centered around Joomla, called Cloud Access. They have quite a few free templates available and I went with their Cloudbase template. Cloudbase is a Joomla 1.5 template. The latest release of Joomla is 1.7, but Taggart hasn't upgraded because there's no real need to do so yet. The differences between the two are mostly mechanical and behind-the-scenes, and upgrading is a real pain.
After changing the template, most of the menus were already in place, because Joomla's modular nature keeps menus and articles locked together from template to template. I just had to change a few things around and reformat a lil bit, no big deal. The real challenge came from upgrading the menus to work with the increased functionality of Cloudbase's MegaMenu. Hover your mouse over the "Our Corporation" panel in the top menu and you'll see what I mean. It's a sliding menu with submenus and the ability to do other cool things like embed videos and audio players.
For the showcase banner under the top menu, I wanted to make a slideshow, but I could not find a Joomla module that would work. So I pasted together some pictures of Taggart WH operators and a wormhole and put some text on it, and a link to our blog entry detailing the history of our corporation's WH operations. Maybe soon I'll make another one for something else.
Underneath the banner are several small modules, each with a link to one of our features, like forums or whatever. I did this to increase the attention they get and to free up space in our top menu. Underneath these modules are the welcome page (right) and the news ticker (left). The news ticker populates any item tagged as news in our articlebase automatically. All of these modules disappear when you navigate to another article (with the exception of the top menu).
A few months ago, when former CFO Liberty Eternal was active, he was working on a new ad campaign for Taggart with an experienced multimedia consultant. I managed to get in touch with the consultant to get some pics she had made and they were pretty slick, so I added one to the top of the menu. The only other things I did were just sprucing up our content itself, which you can see by checking out our articles! Enjoy, and if you have any questions about the website or Joomla you can post a comment to this blog entry.
