Inside The Web Design Studio of Brandon Houston

This week marked the launch of the overhaul of the CKSPEAKS website. CKSPEAKS is a local community website for Chatham-Kent residents to join in forum discussion and keep up to date on happenings around the area. The new site runs off the Joomla CMS which is in my opinion one of the best open-source content managers available. The revised site has been made more modular than the previous version to allow for easy and fast updates.

While the brains behind the website is Joomla, a lot of custom modifications came into play. The forum system was changed to Simple Machines Forum which plays very nicely with Joomla. In order to keep the user database and posts from the previous site the database from phpBB had to be imported and then it was all linked together with the SMF Bridge module that is available. While the current look of the forum is just the base install it will be updated shortly to look more seamless. The users also won’t have to register both in the forum and the website. Instead, user registration is syncronized into one system.
Another integration that took place was the banner system. Joomla’s existing banner manager is somewhat lacking and since CKSPEAKS had a need for a more extensive ad system, OpenAds was brought in. OpenAds is a great ad system with a lot of advanced features to allow management of multiple campaigns. OpenAds was integrated into the Joomla backend of CKSPEAKS and works beautifully.

A few other components were installed into the site to give it a bit more interactivity. An events calendar which registered users can contribute to, a Flash image gallery, and a business card index are all featured on the site.

CKSPEAKS in it’s current state is fully functional but definately growing still. The site was launched as a beta at the request of the client to gives users the ability to decide how it should grow and to test it all out. I’m definitely very proud to have been given the opportunity to grow CKSPEAKS into a large community portal and exciting things are in store, so stay tuned…