This website is made with a large amount of Joomla 1.5, a salad of third party Joomla extensions and a lot of secret herbs and spices (custom PHP templates, CSS, etc.). You’ll have to read on to find out what temperature I had to pre-heat the oven to.

OK, I lied. I won’t really talk about oven temperatures or cooking anymore – it’s not really my strong point after all. If you only arrived at this page after being drawn in by the allure of a new cake recipe, I’m sorry – there must be lots of decent cookery websites for you to look for, or you can see the photo of mince (cunningly disguised as rat) on the only page that’s remains from my first website.

The real point of this page is a brief outline of what I used to put this site together. Feel free to ask about any particular aspects and see the about page.

So this is all based on a Joomla 1.5 content management system. This means I can add new pages quickly and make use of the variety of Joomla add-ons so that I don’t need to concern myself with writing yet another web contact form (for example).

Some parts of Joomla have been more customised than others. For example, the contact page is very basic and only superficially modified to make it roughly fit the style of this website. Other areas are more customised, including my own site-wide Joomla template.

Two of Joomla’s key failings are the default reliance on tables for page layout design and the rigid hierarchical content structure. My custom template should have pretty much eliminated all tables from the layout and the Joomla Tags component allows me a much more flexible tagging system which allows each article to be part of more than one “category”.

The site is valid XHTML / CSS at launch. We’ll have to wait and see how well it holds together if user generated content appears – it’s not something I’ve had time to test completely.