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Atalink Ltd
provides several print titles for the UK market. Lemur - Atalink's online
division, is responsible for building and developing the online versions of
Atalink's titles as well as exploring new online publishing opportunities.
Atalink
recently launched an online version of their print publication ‘Director of
Finance'. During the evaluation of several content management systems Lemur
tested the Open Source CMS Joomla! and found it suitable for their needs. David
Sevenoaks, the Head of lemur, noted that Joomla's ability to change functionally
without high consulting fees and development costs was one of the most
important factors for using the Open Source product.
In the special
case of an online magazine it is important to be able to change the skin of the
site depending on certain views or sections. As the magazine provides a very
high number of content pages and navigational items it wasn't possible to use
the standard template system provided by the Joomla! system. In order to add
this new, special, functionality to the code base Lemur commissioned Think Network GmbH in Munich to develop a new open source extension
to the Joomla! templating system.
The newly
developed SkinManager is an extension to the template system of Joomla! that
allows a simple mapping between different skins and views of extensions. Each
Joomla! component offers different views to present its data. The SkinManager
now handles a simple, configuration based, mapping between those views and
different skins defined in one template. The advantage of the solution is that
a skin becomes a part of a Joomla! template and the designer only needs to
maintain one set of styles and PHP files. This reduces the complexity of the
template and has consequently allowed Lemur to fully implement flexible layouts
in their websites.
The Lemur
SkinManager solution has been developed as an individual solution for Lemur
with the right to release it as Open Source product in future. The development
itself was fully provided by Think
Network GmbH, Munich.
If you have any further questions please do not hesitate to contact Think Network at any time.
Information
about the project:
Director of
Finance online: http://www.dofonline.co.uk
Lemur: http://www.atalink.co.uk
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