Technology of this website

The technology used to produce this website includes:

Content Management System

The Drupal CMS system is used as the underlying base, on top of this the Zen Theme is used as the basis for custom theming of the site.

Wordpress is used for Ruth and Paul's pages, see blog technology page for details of Wordpress configuration.  I decided to use Wordpress for these pages as I have found Drupal blog engine to be quite limited and it is quickly becoming further dated as Wordpress continually improves their functionality.

Javascript

Thankfully Drupal uses the brillant JQuery library for its javascript functionality which makes incorporating a wide range of other plugins very simple:

• Kwicks for JQuery - Provides the main slide menu used right across the site.
• Dimensions - Provides functionality to measure browser elements, used to cater for different screen sizes.
• Corners - Produces the rounded corners used through out the site,
• Cycle - Used on the home page to produce photo rotator,
• Easing - Produces interesting transition effects, used in home page photo cycler,
• Panorama -  Produces the viewer used for panorama photos, eg Newcastle Panoramas.
• Thickbox - Used by the panorama plug-in,
• Lavalamp Menu - Cool menu effect used on Photos from Around the World page.
• Columnizer - Produces multicolumn effect used on site map page,
• EasyToolTip - Simple way to produce good looking tooltips, eg used Port Maquarie on the Australia page.

Photo Galleries

The photo galleries use the Airtight Interactive flash galleries SimpleViewer, AutoViewer, Postcard Viewer, and Andrew Berg's PhotoStack viewer.