Joomla! is an award-winning Content Management System (CMS) that will help you build websites and other powerful online applications. Best of all, Joomla! is an open source solution that is freely available to everybody. Many companies or organizations have requirements that go beyond what is available in the basic Joomla! package or in a freely available extension, so using the core framework, developers can easily build:

• Integrated e-commerce systems
• Inventory control systems
• Data reporting tools
• Custom product catalogs
• Complex business directories
• Reservation systems
• Communication tools
• Application bridges
• or any kind of application to suit a unique need...

I have offered my PHP development skills towards the following joomla site.

digital-central.co.uk/showcase

Supporting, promoting and developing the Screen, Image and Sound industries in the West Midlands

Studio DM contacted me to amend an existing Joomla! template. This was the first project I worked on using this particular type of management system.

• The first task involved was replicating a showcase style feature that had already been designed in ASP into the opensource PHP.
• The client wanted to show contibutors by their id tag. This id tag is controlled in the administration side of the site.
• The description text was configured to appear appropriately not just for pages, but also the catagory that was currently being viewed.
• The menu side bar needed to show only the top 6 contributors. This helps keep this site uptodate & relevant to company activity.
• Also on the side menu the TAGs are sorted descending by the quantity of content in each, and also limited to only showing the top 25 results.
• On the category page, links were added to allow access to the applicable IDs.
• The category/TAG page further included the 1st paragraph without any HTML formatting, images, or embedded flash.
• Part of the solution was the option to integrate flash (when available) into listing pages
• One of the main requirements was to store Images into an array, so lots of images could be saved for a particular entry, and could be limited to only show 1^st on the related category page.

The above was completed for a quick turnaround of within 24 hours. After the job was completed I was also asked to assist in the configuration of the PHP server that would be used for hosting.

Further to the initial project I was asked to develop an auto listing feature for hosting MP3 files. The script browsed a applicable TAG and made a playlist of all MP3 tracks for use in a flash player. Therefore, if the user had uploaded any MP3 tracks; a flash player would appear on the content page.