Once again I returned to work with Jon Levy at Foto8 Magazine to refresh the design and layout of their website.  This work picked up where the last round of design work finished.  That first stage had been to streamline the templates used by the Joomla CMS underlying the website.  This time, the Joomla back-end was enhanced beyond its native capabilities.  The objective was to allow the content editors at Foto8 to more easily manage the photographs that are the centre piece of much of their content (unsurprisingly for a photojournalism publication!)

Joomla Extended

The object extension was the article editor.  I added the ability to link each article in the CMS to a number of images of various sizes.  These images are then utilised in the appropriate context.   When an article appears on the homepage (as the lead article of the day), the biggest, boldest image is shown.  Where the article is shown in another context, such as simply one of many links to 'more articles', the appropriate image variation is shown instead.

Iphone Support and Design 

In addition to a re-design and improved layout for the conventional website, support for Iphone browsers was added.  Utilising a plugin for Joomla that detects the Iphone, a tailor made Iphone template was created.  This provided a number of challenges.  The version of Safari that is part of the Iphone does not (at time of writing) support flash.  Foto8's photo rich content however makes use of several attractive slideshow components. 

In order to still provide this content to Iphone users, alternatives that use static images replace flash when the player is not available.  However, with Joomla components often built using inline CSS styles, or importing their stylesheets from external URLs, many page elements (particularly Iframes loading embedded content) had to be dynamically resized through various Jquery DOM manipulations.

The result is a template that presents the Iphone user with a stripped down, resized version of Foto8.  It favours simplicity and a clear layout whilst still keeping the wonderful photographs centre stage.