New site for school literacy program in South Africa...

I am working with a great volunteer program that is helping with kids’ literacy in South Africa.

http://www.theshinecentre.org.za/

Still a work in progress but the structure and design is there. Still have lots of content and manager users to configure. I did manage to get two jQuery systems to behave.

This is a redesign of a static site I did for these folks about a year or so ago. With the dedication of the staff, great volunteers and the response to the original site the center will be soon expanding into many more branches and hopefully will reach more kids. I feel pretty good about being part of this volunteer effort even though I am in Seattle, which is about as far from South Africa as you can get.

The director is an old primary grade school friend in Cape Town (I was born and raised there) whom I have not seen in thirty years. The internet does make the world seem smaller...

Max

Max,

Congrats! Very nice looking site. I like the menus. Is that lightbox you are using on the images btw? Yep, the internet has a way of shrinking the globe.

cheers/k

K,

That gallery is running via MaxiGallery and Fancybox. There are zillions of "boxes" now but I like this one. Its pretty simple and the CSS is very workable. The manual lifting I am doing is sizing the thumbnails by hand and substituting them into the folder that the MaxiGallery snippet is producing (with exact same file names.) This ensures a nice even size thumbnail system that is cropped exactly the way I want it to be. I will be tweaking the style on the main top menu some more.

The sidebar menu will be updated to a custom styled jQuerry accordion menu. You yourself were of great help getting me on the right path to making this kind of menu work with the Wayfinder snippet. Again, thanks for that! I see that exercise made it into your Complete Guide to Creating Menus in MODx using Wayfinder. This will make three jQuerry scripts which will be interesting as sometimes they don’t all like to play nicely when used on the same page with the same template.

I also have to add some drop down CSS styles to the configuration so that the Centre’s staff can create the appropriate presentation using the TinyMCE editor.

Max

I hope its not too many thumbnails you have to manually resize. I suppose then you were not able to find a resizer that satisfied your requirements?

Well, all the best with the project and looking 4wad to the finished product

/k

Well, the whole thumbnail size and crop area has been discussed by me in the MaxiGallery area of this forum.

I think scripts are great if you have a lot of images. On the other hand scripts can produce awkward looking thumbnails. If your full size images include verticals, horizontals, square shapes and shallow panoramics then the script(s) tend to produce thumbnails that can look odd. I am pretty quick with Photoshop so custom cropping for size and content is no big deal. I like neat rows of equal shaped and sized thumbnails that have good representation of the full size image. Custom cropping can also include NOT showing all of the the full size image: sort of like a tease to get people to actually click the image link...

The big factor of course is the quantity of images...

Nice happy design!

Attached picture is what I experience on IE7@public computer though.

Thanks! I just noticed that after I fired up IE7 in VMware just now.

I think the CSS fix for that should not be too much of a hassle...

Max

PS: its an unholy mess in IE6 though. Little more work to do...

Nice looking site, great initiative. Well done

I like the main navigation rollover effect.