johnmccollum.co.uk

I was recently working on a Joomla! site which required a fairly unusual banner management system. The spec was that the user would be able to enter a list of banners, links, start dates and expiry dates, and that these banners would be displayed in a random order in the main content area. The component will accept all major image formats, and flash movie files. (.swf)

I wasted quite a bit of time trying to mold other components to my needs, but I could have saved myself some time if I had just written my own!

Here we are, then; the result of my labour.

This component requires Joomla 1.5 or later.

LICENSE + DISCLAIMER:Copyright 2008 John McCollum. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.

By downloading this component, you are indicating your acceptance of the terms above. Please make sure you back up your files and database before installing this component.

Click here to download the component!

In days gone by, the five-pager was the mainstay of the web design business - Home, About us, Services, Testimonials, and Contact us. Like an online brochure, it provided small businesses with an online presence, and it provided their customers with the bare minimum of interaction.

At work, we recently took the decision that we weren’t going to do them any more. Just about every customer wants to manage their own content - which is their right - as a bare minimum. Many want blogs, feeds, fora, interactive maps, and other widgets.

The good news is that there are many pieces of open source software that make such requests simple, even trivial. Wordpress divides opinion as a CMS, but I’ve found that with plugins like cforms and this sitemap generator make development speedy and simple.

Most CMS worth their salt produce valid (x)html, so there’s really no reason not to offer the customer these functionalities any more - join me in ditching the five pager as a dinosaur from the past!