The Prints By Sally Web Site
A Simple Request:
It seemed like a simple request: "I need a second gallery added to my web site." Sally Rhone-Kubarek is an artist with an extensive gallery of prints available for purchase on her printsbysally.com web site. And now she desired a separate, gallery with more flexility, a second domain name, and new ways to organize and display her artwork.
It was certainly a reasonable request, however, it exposed a variety of technical and hosting issues. As I looked into enhancing her existing site I found the following:
- The existing site host was no longer supporting the version of PHP on which the site's content management system (CMS) was based.
- The host periodically disabled or shut down the site citing old technology only to bring it back online when asked.
- Joomla, the site's CMS, had no upgrade path, or a very painful manual one if we wanted to spend the time and effort.
- The version of Joomla on which the site was built would have to be upgraded if new features or updates were going to be made.
- There was no way to build on what was there. The core of the CMS had moved on as had the extensions.
You can read all about how we overcame these challenges, deciding on a new CMS (Joomla or Wordpress), how I helped the artist learn and adapt to the new site and its content authoring and editing features, and about the new site features of the site on the One Bad Ant web site: http://www.onebadant.com/index.php/app-blog/293-pbsawbs
