The backroom work, though, has been extensive. The content management system running the site has been upgraded from Joomla! 1.0x to Joomla! 1.5, an upgrade prompted not by the promise of marvellous new facilities but by availability and support of some vital plug-ins. The developers of these plug-ins are now concentrating on 1.5, and support for anything intended for the earlier version of Joomla! is gradually diminishing. I wanted to install new plug-ins to add some features to the site, so now seemed like a good opportunity to upgrade the whole system.

Joomla upgrade

Upgrading from the old 1.0x version of Joomla! is theoretically simple, but it turned out to be a little more complicated in practice. Several articles lost correct links to menu items or certain crucial settings, which meant long-winded checking and resetting.

Another time-consuming part of the process was checking for upgrades to modules and components and redeveloping parts of the site which used modules which are no longer supported (and which haven't been adapted for Joomla! 1.5).

The final part of the upgrade which took longer than anticipated really had nothing to do with the change of backend system - it's just that when you're changing so many things you keep on thinking of better ideas for presenting new or existing content.

CSS tweaks

That explains why I've also tweaked the CSS controlling the layout and typography. The Joomla! upgrade could have been done without changing any of the design (though the design template itself had to be updated to a new format) but I took the opportunity to improve design and readability:

• The body text is now larger, to make longer articles more readable.
• Because the basic text size has increased, headings have also been increased in size to maintain contrast between body and heading. I've taken this opportunity to make them a lot larger and to use a combination of black and mid-grey rather than the previous deep red. I've also rationalised the use of different heading sizes.
• The house font has been changed from Verdana to Helvetica. Helvetica is more stylish, Verdana more readable at small sizes - but since the move to larger body copy, that's no longer an important consideration.

Some of the ideas incorporated in the new version were borrowed - well, stolen, really - from the very stylish wilsonminer.com.