NCCC Website Facelift

[karlos]

All - The theme on the NCCC website that controls the "look" and "feel" has recently become obsolete and no longer supported by the developers. That means our underlying Joomla CMS (Content Management System) that provides the software to make it easy to manage the site, can no longer be updated without a change to the theme - see recent issue.

So... I just changed the theme to a more modern evolution of the old theme. It has a cleaner look, imo, maintains all of the old features, and has some new cool things that I hope you all will notice. These are the main features:

1. It will be supported for at least 3-4 more years, so no need to make further changes

2. The Home page now has a cool images crawler which is easy to change the images scrolling across the page. Put your mouse over that area and slide left to right to pause, slow down, change direction. Neat! [on a tablet, hand gestures work similarly, and you won't see the scrolling images on a phone, to keep the display compact and usable on extra small screens.]

3. The new theme is mobile device friendly. When the screen gets small, the 2 column pages are stretched into one long column. Very easy to check rides on your phone now. The navigation menu on your phone is accessible from the the "3 bars", upper right .

4. Page space is better devoted to content. Note the slimmer navigation bar on non-Home pages. Also, as you scroll down the page, the navigation bar stays rooted at the top, providing easier navigation. At first, it may look like we lost all the menus on the left hand side of the screen. They are there... just click on the "3 bars", upper left . This brings in that menu with all the same entries as before so, you can navigate, then it slides out of the way to view the page you move to. See screenshot.

5. The new theme is far easier to maintain and customize from an administrator's point of view. It only took ~2 hours to get the look you now see and it's a button press to go back and forth between themes. Contrast that with the ~1 week to customize our original Joomla theme in 2009 and ~1 day in 2014 when we had to upgrade because of software version issues, just as we faced today.

Feedback is welcome. It is easy to tweak things

I hope you like it and I hope it's not a trouble to make the switch now. I wanted to do it before heading out of town. If it's really bugging you, take former NCCC member Heidi Swanson's advice and read Who Moved My Cheese?. If you still can't get behind the change, then perhaps you're willing to take over the website. I took it up in 2007 with absolutely NO website knowledge (but a long career in software development), have had fun with it, learned a LOT, but am willing to share the experience with anyone willing to pick it up... for sure 

[Anthony Scozzari]

Looks great, Karl!  Thanks and hope you're doing well and I see you out on the road soon.....or if not for breakfast....or both!!
Anthony