It's been a long time since I last updated the site. 2.5 years have gone by and I love my new job. Working at Massive Entertainment - a Ubisoft studio is basically a dream come true, more on that later. This post will give some detail on all the new bells and whistles now that I've upgraded from Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 2.5.
Modules
- JComments is first and most important module that I needed. This module has served me well over the years and I don't want to lose my history of comments so I was glad that it's still supported.
- Simple Image Gallery was next on the list. Almost all the images I show on the site use it. It's super simple and works great.
- Facebook Graph Connect is an interesting module that I worked with on another site. I'm now using Facebook as my primary method of authentication so no more captchas for people to fill in to add a comment. No, I will not post on your wall and I won't do anything with your info.
- ITP Social Buttons was the last one to go in. I thought I might as well add a sharing module if I'm using facebook connect as well. This one was the right balance of simplicity and variety and most importantly it integrates with articles.
Modifications
JComments Facebook avatars
Now that I had Facebook integration I felt it important to include people's avatars with their posts. I dug into the guts of JComments and modified their Gravatar support to forward to Facebook instead.Custom Geshi
Geshi is a great for displaying code (as you can see), but the built in Joomla implementation doesn't have a lot of flexibility. The main improvements are:
- Support for linking to external files using src attribute
- Being able to add a link to the source file or not
- Adding a header with the code type in it
- Adding an overall class for better styling
Sticky Menu
Having the menu stick to the top of the screen was surprisingly easy with a tiny bit of javascript.
Template
In the previous version of my site I had found a decent looking template and just customized it a little bit. Now that I'm a lot more familiar with Joomla, and that it's really hard to find good templates, I just set one up from scratch. The documentation was pretty straightforward in getting all the files necessary to setup the basic template, then just go from there. With some basic html and php skill and a lot of googling it's not that much work.
The other fun thing was that I actually made pretty much all the art myself. It's still not up to the standard that I would like but it's workable for now.
That's about it for this update. If things go well I'll be a bit more active in the future. I already have an article/tool to publish and I need to update all the games I've worked on in the last few years.