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.