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