OK, introductions first. I’m Peter the Bare Tracks Australia webmaster. You've gotta love that term only a bunch of geeks, and to be fair I’m one, could come up with a term that sounds so high and mighty yet refers to a role not to dissimilar to someone editing a word document. A lot of the more popular sites are popular not because of their webmasters but the stories, images, information, sights and sounds they hold. The webmasters role is to simply stick it all together. Now that spleen vent out of the way lets get to the details of what makes this site tick. Hopefully this will help those who are looking to build or upgrade a site for their own club or association but have little or no idea where to start.

Firstly the site is constructed using a “Content Management Systems” or CMS for short. These basically allow you to construct web site framework to which you add content. This then means that ongoing maintenance of a site, such as adding a latest news item can be done by some one with little or no web design experience and it will still “fit” in the existing site.

In this case the CMS I’m using is called Joomla, version 1.5. This is an open source CMS, content management system. running on a Compaq DL360 G2 server in a data centre in Sydney Australia. This machine runs an operating system package referred to as blue quartz which is based on an appliance based web hosting platform called cobalt. Blue-quartz is a Linux operating system which comes bundled with a web based user front end for all of the routine site management tasks meaning that all of the not technical users of a hosted site can manage their own users and pages without requiring our help, well for the most part at least.

This server is also used to support our own company, JBO Communications. and a few other popular sites like VK-HAM and it's associated classifieds site.

While Joomla comes with a couple of ready to use templates we chose to use a template from shape 5 called DuoPlate to build the "Look" of the site. The image display functionality comes from Shape 5's Lyte Box.

As always a bit of reading material doesn't go astray so here's a couple of books I used to get a bit of a handle on Joomla.

Firstly, Beginning Joomla From Novice to Professional by Dan Rahmel. As the name suggests this is a start with nothing and ending with a basic site type of book.

The other book which saw a fair bit of use is CSS Web Site Design by Eric A. Meyer. So much of the appearance of a Joomla based site is controlled by Cascading Style Sheets and this book is a great first start / reference source.

While most, if not all, of the information in these books can be found in various tutorials on line a lot of the development that I do is on a laptop running vmware on the way to work so connectivity is an issue. As such I find a hard copy a better option.

For those interested vmware is an application which segments up a computer allowing it to look like multiple machines in my case I have the same operating system and applications running on the laptop as I have on the server which hosts the live site. The upshot of this is that while I'm on the train I can do development work and see the results that a user would see and any problems this development creates is limited to the development environment and not the live site. A word of advice here though if you are going to run vmware on any machine do it a favour and load it up with a reasonable amount of memory, 2 or more gig.

All of the images used on the site were taken by members of Bare Tracks Australia. The images were post processed in Photoshop CS2.

The quotes that you see at the bottom of almost every page are generated from a simple module I wrote on the train home from work. It took more time to format and load the quotes into a database than it did to write the module which I think goes to show just how powerful a little Joomla / PHP knowledge can be.

If you have any questions on how this site was put together, suggestions for improving it, or general comments on this site, I'd like to here them feel free to contact me by clicking here.

Regards

Peter, Bare Tracks Webmaster.