Greenhouse Website
At the CMS Expo I shared a site I had developed for the University of Massachusetts: New England Greenhouse Up-dates http://negreenhouseupdate.info. I’ve gotten several emails from Expo attendees asking about the extensions used, so here’s that info.
Note: I had to edit this blog entry in order to save it — all references to up-dates would normallly not have the hyphen, but my host has great security and will not allow certain database terms to be used in an article or blog. I will need to ask them to make an exception for this site and will edit the blog post once that is done.
The site features a blog of “up-dates” about all the things that can go wrong in greenhouses – and best practices to avoid them. Some articles are just text, while a photo library provides a visual database organized in categories. When we began the conversion to Joomla! we considered various photo gallery extensions, but ended up using regular Jooma! articles and two separate category blog displays.
For the greenhouse site we were most interested in a single search mechanism that would return “up-dates” (text articles) with “photos” (images with captions – sometimes article length) — we also wanted the client to be able to use the same interface for maintaining or adding new content of either type.
The extensions used to make this work were: imagesized to create the thumbnails from the normal article images and
custom properties for the tagging and search functionality that allowed searching by keyword, type of article and/or topic.
There was a template override with variables so that up-date article “readmores” would say “read more” but the image library blog readmore links would be just the title.
I wrote that up in this blog post.
Tags: Joomla!, template overrides