HISCOM Site Customisations

Both the HISCOM web site and this wiki have been customised. The following changes have been made so far to support committee members.

HISCOM site
Note: The Joomla portion of the site had remained unedited since late 2008, and thus it was removed in mid-2011.


 * Hacked the template index.php so it uses a 1024 pixel wide default. The original 800 pixel wide template was too narrow.
 * Hacked the template template_css.css so it enabled a number of things:
 * Larger text (to 12px default) for tired eyes. 11px default for news feeds and modules so the main content is given the user's focus.
 * Wider site title so we could get the whole committee name in the title.
 * Fixed the left margin and bolding on newsfeed display so that more text could fit in the news feed box.
 * Left aligned the syndication icons because centred looked wrong.
 * Enabled the default Joomla "search engine friendly URLs".
 * Changed display of content items and components so the resulting pages are less distracting — Joomla puts out a lot of extra stuff on certain pages, and this was making the page too complex.
 * Enabled the News menu item so we can trawl through the news items more easily
 * Enabled the Links menu item so we can link to member sites and related organisations. Removed TDWG link from the menu now that it was on the Links page.
 * Enabled the Contact Us menu item with one contact for the HISCOM Chair, directed to the  email address.
 * Added our own custom .ico file in place of the Joomla default.
 * Tested the FAQs feature, but found that the Contact Us feature was going to do a better job.
 * Added Links and News items to test the new features.
 * Upgraded to Joomla Version 1.0.13 (was pretty easy, just backed up the template folder, ran the upgrade from the cpanel fantastico function and then restored the template) --Peter 13:49, 2 August 2007 (EST)
 * Updated the Global Configuration to ensure the new .ico continues to be used after the site upgrade. Benr 21:23, 6 August 2007 (EST)
 * Updated the menu item for "Links" so it doesn't display hits for each Member Site or Related Organisation. Benr 12:37, 9 August 2007 (EST)

Wiki

 * Ran the edits suggested at http://bit.ly/qzJvW1 so that the site runs in PHP 5.3.
 * Implemented the Cite.php extension so that our pages can do citations and references.
 * Enabled file uploads so that PDFs could be created and uploaded in place of some older HTML-based technical manuals that were too difficult to convert to Wiki or Joomla pages.
 * Added a logo that matches the main site.