NZMac.com - Supporting the New Zealand Mac community

Surprise!! Yes welcome to the new look NZMac.com! Such a surprise, I hadn't even planned on doing this. In fact, you know what you shouldn't do 7 hours before you're about to take your whole site down to convert the forum to new software? Spot an awesome Joomla template and buy it!

But hey...usually I'm the sort of guy who plans for when he is going to be spontaneous, so this time I just thought "What the heck...go for it"....so here we are.

Joomlashack is a Joomla Template website I've had my eye on for some time. When Joomlashack first launched their site featured a great fluid (that's web developer talk for "stretchy") design that I really liked....so I've always been keen to use a design.

Late on Thursday I spotted an amazing commercial template for sale on the site and although it seemed a little dark, it appealed in lots of other ways...most notably the fact that the design featured...

• Tableless design and 100% CSS based
• Very lightweight and fast loading
• Highly flexible layout with over 10 module placement positions
• Highly optimised for search engines
• Integrated text resize and layout switch buttons
• When set to fluid, all columns and boxes resize
• Joomla 1.0+ compatible, Mambo 4.5.2/4.5.3 compatible.
• Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional and valid CSS
• Valid 508 Accessibility
• Special customise.css file for highly flexible customisation

Reading the forum on the site, I spotted that there was a "Mac Blue" design in the works. Even so, it looked like this was going to cost a bit more than the original template, but then on Saturday afternoon, the author changed his mind and included the Mac blue in the package (me posting messages in his forum saying "Hey, included the blue design and I'll buy in a heartbeat" probably helped!)...hence the reason I purchased the template and shut down the site.

The design achieves a look and feel that I know I'd never be able to produce that quickly for a Joomla site. Not only that, but the CSS compliance was something that I either had two choices with...

• Go with the default CSS friendly design that comes with Joomla, but everyone uses
• Spend my life trying to come up with a design I could be pleased with...before retirement, but never get to the point of achieving good CSS design.

Now, before you start saying "Hey, I've tested the site and it doesn't validate as CSS compliant", please keep in mind that while the template design *is* compliant, all of the modules and info that I then ask this site to display aren't....and that's what has taken the most amount of work and will continue to do so. In fact, if you attempt to test the site you'll probably get an immediate error saying the site has no "Doc Type"....this is a known error with the forum integration and I'm working on it.

In short, the look and feel of the site has been made far more compliant, but the next step is to get the information being "pulled" into that look working better....but that's the next step. There are a lot of issues to resolve, such as Forum Feeds, Login/Out issues and session areas, but in the meantime I am thrilled with the new look NZMac.com!!

Cheers,

Phil

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