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The Mag goes live!

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We're very happy and proud to announce the launch of our latest project, The Mag, one of the longest-established and most loved Newcastle United magazines, written by the fans for the fans.

Established since 1988, The Mag is a fiercely independent and strong voice within the Newcastle United fan community, with a proud and long history.  Our challenge was to extend this legacy onto the web for the first time, attempting to take some of their best-loved sections to the web, while also adding a new spin on things.

As a Newcastle United supporter and long-time reader of The Mag, I am especially proud to have been part of this project - it's been a real joy to be part of the team for the last couple of months!

Click here to check out the website.

 

SercoLearning.com goes live

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We're proud to announce the launch of our newest project, Serco Learning.  Representing a landmark project for BigSpring, we collaborated with our associates at Three Rooms agency to put this project together, combining our skills and resources over the last few months.

Powered by Joomla and ZOO, the website serves as the main corporate site for the company, showcasing their wide range of innovative software products aimed at schools and higher & further education organisations.

Take a look at the full site here.

 

MyLacrosseVideoGame.com - A community-made video game

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We're pleased to announce the launch of MyLacrosseVideoGame.com, a website created by Lacrosse fans and players aiming to create a community-funded, community-made Lacrosse video game for all major consoles!  Truly a groundbreaking concept in the worlds of Lacrosse and gaming.

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Plugin for unsubscribing with JS G-Kunena

We use JomSocial and Kunena for member sites.  Quite a lot in fact.  A great alternative to JomSocial's discussions is to use Kunena and an excellent plugin, JS G-Kunena by latitudweb.com.  This allows JomSocial's entire group discussion system to be replaced by Kunena, automatically creates forums when groups are created and links all discussions through to posts within the forum for the given group.

What it doesn't do is remove any subscriptions a user has to the respective forum when they leave a group.  Our users didn't like this, so we wrote a plugin that does exactly that.

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Using and Changing JomSocial's Form Validation

As discussed in our previous blog about Adding Customer Registration Fields to Joomla and JomSocial using jos_user, the documentation on how to use and customise JomSocial's own validation system is somewhat sketchy.  Well... almost non-existent!

After some investigation, we've discovered more about how it works, how it can be used, and how it can be modified and re-used to create valiation rules for your own custom registration fields.

All this can be done without any real knowledge of Javascript, AJAX or JQuery.  All you need is a little basic programming know how (and a healthy dose of patience).

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Integrating Zoo 2.0 with JomComment

We've started using YooTheme's Zoo 2.0 CCK pretty heavily with some of our projects.  Despite a couple of behaviours that we found surprising (no method of displaying child category items in Category views), it's an excellent tool with a very powerful feature - custom elements.

We needed to integrate Azrul's JomComment into our Zoo driven site and as there is no integration available, we thought we'd share what we found.

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How to create a simple blank page in Joomla

It may sound like a simple task - how do I create a blank page in Joomla so I can just full the page with my own modules and not show any content?

Surprisingly, the standard Joomla package (as of version 1.5.18) doesn't have a menu item that will allow you to do this.  Or at least, it's not obvious.

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danykidrecords.com launches

We launched our most recent project on Monday 1st March for Dandy Kid Records.  Dandy Kid Records, and its sister label, IT_Tizz are a UK and US based dance music label.  They aim to be one of the strongest branded music labels in the world, booking worldwide tours for their roster of 14 worldwide artists.

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Wanted: MySpace layout designer

We're hiring!  We're looking for a talented MySpace layout designer capable of undertaking work on a project basis.  Clients will be primarily in the music industry, but wider experience is a bonus.

Ideal candidate will have a portfolio of 10-20 published layouts of different styles, and must be able to work to tight deadlines to specific client requirements.

Interested? Please email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it with rates and recent examples of your work.

 

cableguys.co.uk is launched

We have unveiled our latest project, www.cableguys.co.uk.

The Cable Guys are an East Midlands based aerial, satellite, electrical & home entertainment installation company. After trading for 6 years on their startup website, they approached us to redesign their site and improve their search engine optimisation in order to attract more internet trade for their ever expanding business.

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Music Inn Goes Live

Our most recent site has now gone live.  This is a site for an independent music instrument shop in Nottingham, The Music Inn.

Music Inn has been a family run business based on Nottingham's Alfreton Road for over 90 years.  They had an existing site that needed a refresh and were interested in making the leap into the world of e-commerce.

We've launched the first phase which was planned as a redesign of the existing site, including better SEO, detail about their services plus a content management system to allow them to update the site with new offers.

The e-commerce portion of the site is scheduled for release in the new year.  Watch this space!

 

djdaveseaman.com is unleashed

We're proud to announce that our most recent project has now gone live.  We were approached by the world reknowned DJ, Dave Seaman (Renaissance, Global Underground) for a new site to replace the one he'd been running since 2003.  With today's social networks waiting to be exploited, it was a great opportunity to build a site that integrates heavily with these social networks.

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Newcastle United Supporters Trust launches

We're proud to announce the launch of our latest project, the Newcastle United Supporters Trust website.

The NUST is a legally constituted, democratic, not-for-profit Supporters Trust, with thousands of members and a busy online community.  The site features a fully-featured Joomla! CMS with a JomSocial-powered online community and forums.  At the centre of the project is a subscription-based membership system which collects payment and member data online, serving as the trust's primary marketing and recruitment hub.

This has been one of our most challenging and enjoyable projects to date.  We'll be publishing a number of white papers and tutorials for some of the things we've learned along the way.

Check out the website at http://www.nust.org.uk

 

Batch Creation of Joomla Passwords

Ever needed to populate the password field in Joomla's jos_user table but didn't know how?  Neither did we, but we found out.

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Adding Custom Registration Fields to Joomla and JomSocial using jos_user

Working on a recent project for a client, it became clear to that we needed to hack the standard JomSocial registration process to capture extra user information during the registration process.  Crucially - this data needed to be stored in Joomla's jos_user table, and not JomSocial's own external tables.

We couldn't find any step-by-step guides on the internet, so we've shared our findings with you here:

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