Been a quiet week in the blogging sense as literally all my spare time during the week has gone into relaunching KilkennyMusic.com. The site had previously been working on a PHPNuke 7.8 install with phpBB integrated for the forums…. no more!
After pulling the site down last Tuesday in the very wee hours of the morning, it has relaunched this morning on a Joomla install. Most of the work involved was in getting all the users and forum posts migrated to the new setup, then spending a good bit of time templating up the site (and the forums to match) before getting all the components installed.
For anyone who is interested, the site is running the latest version of Joomla with the latest version of phpBB backing the forums. Community Builder looks after the members and integrates well with the forums. That too has had a bit of work done to it to cater for pulling in users posts from the forums, linking their avatars, providing each member with their own homepage and guestbook setup (MySpace comments style). There’s a new free classifieds area, post up some photos, sell your bits and pieces. The photo galleries and Artists Area of the site have been revamped thanks to some new components (thought slightly lacking in content as I’ve to load the backups in today). There’s new live chat features, blogs, podcasts going in this week, free mp3 downloads, KKM radio… and more besides!
The site now also boasts our new online magazine, ‘Sound System’ which has been made free to non-members as well, we’ve got interviews from some nice bands on the horizon (Laminate, Republic Of Loose, Fugazi, Yo La Tengo and more), a few new writers on board (or just people who were on board before but are now adopting a writers position as well) and overall the site – performance-wise and user-wise has improved a hell of a lot from its PHPNuke incarnation last week.
If you’re interested in the music, or you’re based in Kilkenny, do drop in and register – its free!
My thanks to everyone involved in KKM with me behind the scenes, to all the bands that have joined us for live sets during the past 12 months, to the Kilkenny Arts Office and the Arts Council for approving KKM for the Arts Acts Grant for 2006 and to everyone else that we’ve met along the way.
Why the relaunch?
We turned 1 year old on September 19th… gotta put something nice on for your birthday! Maybe now I can actually get to bed at a decent hour!
Nice looking site. You have a couple of alignment issues in FF:
Also In The NewsBox model problem. What platform do you develop on?
I found the lack of color on the search input a bit weird initially but I suppose once you get used to it it’s not that strange 🙂
Hey Richard,
Aye, I notice the flaw with the ‘also in the news’ area when it comes to displaying horiztal news items. Its impacting on the actual news area header as opposed to the news title itself so i’ll get to it soon enough! One or two small teething issues design-wise but overall its coming along nicely.
The site itself is developed on a joomla backend with virtually everything php & database driven. Forums are a modded install of phpBB to integrate with the joomla install.
The theming a colour scheme is fairly relative to the old version of the site but this one has been customised from the ground up so there’s a few interesting quirks in there.
Thanks for the feedback though. Anything else you can offer up would be greatly appreciated!
Hello again
I see that the comment didn’t like me pasting in the code 🙁
My bad – I should have asked if you develop locally on a windows box or something else! Really wondered what browser you used?
Apologies – you went to some length to describe the sites architecture.
Nice chatting with you!
Best rgds
Richard.
Ah my bad…. developed locally on a windows box running apache, mysql 5, php5. Browser-wise i’m on FF1.5, hopping in and out of IE for development uses. Figures over the last 12 months give the overall visitors number about 47% at firefox which is nice and high, means i may get to fixing those quirks in the style!