After a somewhat lengthy hiatus TheCleverGeek.com is back in business! With a few organ transplants and a minor face lift we hope the site will continue to grow and attract a healthy community of geeks. After much of the old site began to break due to out of date software installed in the CMS I'd begun to lose interest in the website. However over the past several months I've been slowing repairing/upgrading TheCleverGeek a little bit at a time.
I've never been totally please with the design, as it was something very basic I threw together, so I made some very very subtle changes. I'm still not 100% thrilled with what I have, but with the amount of spare time alotted. With the amount of work involved in maintaining other areas of the site, let alone writing content articles, forum posts/threads, doesn't give me the time I want or need to come up with a great design. So to you graphic designers out there, if you want to
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you have I'll be more than happy to take them into consideration. I still have quite a bit of templating to work on with the CSS and the HTML display, but I figured I'd launch the new site and fix the aesthetics as I go along.
Much of the site has stayed the same, but I've upgraded and changed quite a few of the components installed on the site. The biggest change was moving from Joomla 1.0.x to Joomla 1.5, which caused most of the headache, but was necessary in the long run. This meant that many of the components that were installed on the site would either stop working, or require an upgrade. This wasn't entirely a bad thing. It allowed me to find newer, better supported components, many of which had awesome features their predessors had not.
Upgraded Forum
I've upgraded the forum from Fireboard to Kunena. I decided to make the switch after bestofjoomla.com seemed to no longer support and provide updates to the extension and Kunena would work very nicely with the new user profile extension. The nice thing about Kunena is that it's a fork of Fireboard, so much of the look, feel, and way the extension works is the same. It also allowed for easy integration to many of the other extensions, including SEF urls, which I think is great. Because it was a fork of Fireboard much of the database table structure was kept intact so all of the old threads and posts were seamlessly transferred as well.
New Profile System
With the upgrade of Joomla 1.5 I wanted to try and keep as many of the components 1.5 native as possible to avoid using legacy mode (even though the forum currently requires it). This meant that with the current progress Community Builder was making wasn't cutting it. I found Jom Social, researched it, and decided that overall it would fit the needs of the site better, and was alot easier to customize out the door. It also integrated nicely with the forum, and had several nifty mini-components that come with it. I'm still a little skeptical of it though, but we'll see how things go.
There are quite a few other changes or additions to the site, such as the instant messaging, lack of a gallery/downloads area (which will eventually come back in time), but for the most part everything should be similar to the older version of the site. There's still work that needs to be done, so if you happen to experience any issues in using the website, posting articles, etc... please
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with specifics so that I can fix the issue. Otherwise enjoy the website!
