Deepdene Bears Web Site
During the second quarter of 2004, my friend and
colleague Tim Norton, CEO of
Omniton , also asked me to consider creating a new
logo and web site for the
Deepdene Bears Cricket Club . Tim is club president, a past player and a
genuine cricket tragic.
Design Philosophy
I had been interested for some time in the various
content management system (CMS) based portal sites. Such
a dynamic publishing solution just had to be a better way to
go than something static like the pages produced by MS
FrontPage.
Using a CMS, I would be able to design and build the
Deepdene Bears Cricket Club website, but then put control of
the web site back into the hands of its owners for its
ongoing operation and management. After looking around and testing a few
of the most popular CMS portal options, I settled on CPG-Nuke as the best way forward.
The Tools
The following software tools were used to build the
Deepdene Bears Cricket Club web site:
- CPG-Nuke 8.2b
- Microsoft Windows XP Professional
SP2 and IIS for my testing platform
- Linux 2.6.7-1-grsec and Apache
1.3.31 for
the live public platform
- PHP 4.3.9
- MySQL 4.0.20 standard
- phpMyAdmin 2.6.0
- NoteTab Light
- Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 and Mozilla Firefox 1.0
- Adobe PhotoShop 7.0
- Adobe ImageReady 3.0
- Adobe Illustrator 10
- Microsoft FrontPage 2003, to build some page
elements
- WS_FTP for Windows
Site Construction
Jaguar PC was chosen to host the web site. They were
running
Linux Kernel version: 2.6.7-1-grsec, Apache version 1.3.31
(Unix), PHP version 4.3.9, MySQL version 4.0.20-standard and
phpMyAdmin 2.6.0-pl1.
First, I set everything up and installed CPG-Nuke v8.2b
onto my home Windows XP Professional based system. That gave
me a testing and development platform where I could play
around to my hearts content, and then upload or input the
final versions onto the public web site.
The colours used by the Deepdene Bears Cricket Club are
green and gold. Plus cricket is played on large grass oval
grounds. Thus developing an appropriate green and gold
theme was a necessity.
I located a set of subGreen images on the phpBB support
forums to replace the default subSilver theme images used in the phpBB forum system that is built
in to CPG-Nuke. Additional images in the same style were
also created for some of the other modules, especially the
Coppermine photo gallery.
Then I set about changing the various cascading style
sheets over to a green and gold theme, building topic icons,
avatars etc.
Many a time I realised I was on a steep learning curve
with so much being so new to me. And of course I was making
the learning curve even steeper by not being prepared to
settle with a standard theme, and getting into the bowls of
the CPG-Nuke portal code and themes and making so many
changes. I struck many a problem and spent many an hour
hunting for the right way to make my changes.
Let me say, that there were many times when it might have
got the better of me. But then I turned to other CPG-Nuke
users for help via the appropriate support forums. On every
occasion the support and assistance I received was simply
marvelous.
The Results
The
Deepdene Bears Cricket Club web site went live in November 2004.
I
am certainly delighted with the results achieved by using CPG-Nuke. Better still, I think the club members, plus those
who have taken on administration and moderator roles, are
very happy too.
Last modified:
Tuesday, 30 October 2007
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