Portfolio

Back when we were developing sites for Joomla 1.0, there was an extremely useful little extension called PeopleBook that didn't survive the transition to Joomla 1.5. Brew Your Own and its sister site, Winemaker Magazine, provided the perfect excuse to write my own from scratch. It became so popular among my colleagues that they encouraged me to make Grumpy Contacts available for general release.

I created a number of specialized toys (er - I mean tools!) for these sites. One example: BYO needed a specialized database for managing lists of hops, grains and yeasts. Working with a Flash designer, we created a brewing calculator that uses the database for its dropdown selections.

An in-house database maintained on an AS/400, a need for the capabilities of Joomla and a little coordination with the company programmers and you have a Joomla site with a user list primarily maintained by their internal database system. How cool is that?!

"When I found out that Bill could make an AS400 server talk to Joomla, that was when I realized he could do absolutely anything."
~ Jen Kramer
4Web, Inc.
Quote from her book, "Joomla! Start to Finish"

[Sorry - no link. This site is an intranet only available to valid users]

Talk about a fun project!

Many eons ago, when Tyrannosaurus was king (or was it just a scavenger?) , someone created a simple little Access database for keeping track of student registrations in the Continuing Ed department. Along comes the web and, the database without change is used in an ASP web application. Needless to say, all created on the cheap by hobbyists who weren't conversant with proper database design principles or structured coding. I've seen a lot of badly designed datbases, but this was very possibly the worst.

Along comes Joomla! and a chance to professionally recreate this ASP/Access application into a Joomla extension. A complete solution that includes:

• A complex, full featured backend for managing the classes and registrations
• Class listings
• Simple and advanced class searching
• Registration through a shopping cart-like tool.