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About this Blog

This is the first in a series of blog posts about major Joomla websites and the developers who built them. First up is Jack Bremer and the major U.K. arts website theArtsDesk.com.

1) Hi Jack. Could you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Hi, and thanks for this opportunity to talk about this exciting project! I'm 29, loving living in London and running digital marketing agency 3B Digital (3bweb.com) with my older brother and business partner, Alex Bremer. Alex set the company up in 1998 after discovering that he could use Microsoft Publisher to build these things called web pages to show photos to family abroad. A little delving into the "code" it was making led to his partnering with a programmer and accountant while he dealt with design. I started working with Alex about 5 years ago and we now have an office in Battersea, London UK, where we employ 3 other people fulltime plus a few freelancers around the world who assist with certain aspects of our work.

I'm passionate about what we do; it's fascinating to get under the skin of a client's company, and much like an accountant or solicitor might, you can ask just about any question of a client - I can best help represent them on the web if I understand their business model, profit margins, unique selling point, current customers and more. The tools we get to play with are such fun too - every day something new comes out for us to play with, usually in the form of something from Google, Facebook or another awesome Joomla extension. Every single day we learn something new and always have at the back of our minds the question, "how could my clients benefit from this?"  

2) What or who is theArtsDesk.com?

theartsdesk is a UK-based group of journalists and photographers who saw what was happening in the shinking print-based press and decided they had to take the bull by the horns and go it on their own. They have their "mother superior" in the form of dance critic Ismene Brown, and there are about 40 contributors (called "Deskers") arranged in teams (called "Hubs") who manage the site's content and Google Apps-powered calendars for the various artforms.

3) How did the project with the Arts Desk come about?

3B were suggested to theartsdesk via another 3B client, English National Ballet (ballet.org.uk). theartsdesk liked the fact that 3B understood the arts world, had a strong interest in music (we LOVE live music!) and theatre (Alex and I have both worked backstage at the Palace Theatre in London, and I often stage manage a mad show at Glastonbury Festival, called Twisted Cabaret). We were opinionated about the ways the journalists could develop the site away from static print mimicry into a more dynamic and interactive web format. We share the same experimental attitude to the site development as the journalists, and there was a mutual exchange of ideas that enabled the site to be unusually elegant in a traditional sense and also pioneering in its usability. The relationship is ongoing and continues to spring surprises on both sides!

4) Do you know why they made the decision to use Joomla?

I think it came down to three main factors: price, DIY management and flexibility.

Price: Using Joomla allows us to help clients punch above their weight - in this case the venture was entirely speculative with the journalists raising the money for the site themselves. Being open source was extremely attractive to theartsdesk, and when we showed some examples of the powerful GPL extensions I knew they were beginning to get excited!

DIY management: again for economic reasons, it was necessary for the journalists to run the site totally themselves - and it works extremely well: we gave one 3 hour tutorial to 14 of them, who then shared their new-found knowledge with the others through screencasts and instructions put into Google Docs and Sites. We rarely take any calls from the 40 or so that are adding to the site every day - they just get on with it, and come back to us for new functionality.

Flexibility: We have found Joomla to be so scalable and choose it over any other system for all sizes of sites. theartsdesk were excited by the wide variety of extensions, the ability to easily add third-party tools and the potential for us to build them custom components should they have very specific requirements. The site has to make money, which is mostly in the form of banner adverts - something Joomla handles out-of-the-box. The democracy of open-source appealed, but above all it was the multi-categorising feature that was important, to enable copy to be filtered by artform, type, author, tag and so on, following the many ways that users choose to stream their reading - this requirement led us to the game-changing discovery of K2...

5) What extensions did you use in building the site?

This site, despite its size, has a very simple collection of extensions, and here are the most important ones:

• K2 - this was our first K2 site, which took a little getting used to, but its power was immediately realised - everything comes with K2 as standard, it's a complete publishing package that is ready to go as soon as it's installed. theartsdesk knew how they wanted the site to look and work, and we were able to get under the hood of K2 and quickly change parts we needed to work in different ways. One example would be tagging - until very recently they had over 2300 different tags in their K2 articles - so it became very important that the main ones were at the top, with subsequent tags alphabetised. We added this functionality early on but as the number of tags grew, site browsing and editing slowed. We optimised our database queries and reduced the query time from 18 seconds to 0.3 seconds - a massive improvement and one we then submitted back to the Joomlaworks team for potential inclusion in a future K2 release. That's just one example of how the open source nature of the Joomla community has worked to everyone's mutual benefit.
• JCE Editor - hands down the best editor for Joomla - it allowed us to provide their authors with a subset of features, while retaining the full functionality for us and their admins. Paying for the subscription for the advanced JCE tools is a must - the extended image manager makes life SO easy!
• ReReplacer - The journalists use a variety of systems in which to compose their copy, so we have things being pasted in from all sorts of places with different formatting. JCE does a great job of stripping everything out for us, and we always encourage clients to paste into Notepad then back out and into Joomla to deformat, but it doesn't always sink in. When I find formatting that affects site layout I just add it to ReReplacer to ensure it's cleaned out on page load. It's a bit of a grubby way to do things but it works quickly and for past and future articles.
• XMap - Gives us a dynamic Google Sitemap as well as visitor-facing sitemap - works a treat!
• FrontPage Slideshow - a personal favourite, I LOVE that you can time-limit slides just like Joomla Articles. The journalists manage this themselves too when they need to push certain things on the homepage.
• CacheCleaner - As the site grew, it began to slow down - we were playing catchup in terms of upgrading the server or hosting package each month before they ran out of storage, bandwidth or CPU power. We started trying everything to speed it up, and one thing that really helped was gaining a better understanding of the Joomla cache. The CacheCleaner button is a great extension from www.nonumber.nl which allows us or the journalists to empty the cache quickly, and even when not logged in.
• Simple Image Gallery - This works a treat, and is another great extension from the Joomlaworks crew (who also gave us K2, AllVideos and FPSS among others!). It interfaces brilliantly with K2 and shows gorgeous galleries of photos with lightbox popups that are all-the-rage at the moment.

6) What major obstacles did you come across when building the site?

Learning K2 for the first time, on a large site with very specific requirements was a challenge at times - I try whenever possible to only use tools we know well on any site build, but K2 was so new we had to just jump in and start building it! As I've mentioned, hosting issues arose pretty quickly, but as soon as we teamed up with Rochen hosting, all was well - their awesome MVS package eats up a chunk of monthly site revenue, but is an area you mustn't skimp on.

Another obstacle is something I'm sure is familiar to all Joomla developers - trying to ensure the right modules and templates appear on the right pages - usually it's quite easy but in this site, you can navigate to an article in many many ways, so ensuring they have the right Itemid to show the correct right column content and background was tricky - although articles only exist in one category, they will often have several tags - and it's these tags that we want to use to determine the look of the page. Tags don't show in a URL or have any heirarchy, so having the site understand which tag to use as the main one for an article required educating the journalists and tweaking code. It's still a work in progress, and we often change the exact functionality when an update to K2 comes out.

7) Any features or extensions you wish you'd had?

I know they'd like to be able to easily manage video clips that they can edit and deploy easily in their articles. I might have to give the Joomla-friendly video solutions from kaltura.com a try! I think a K2 archive with alphabetical navigation would be great, and if I could think of a way to have a music player (I know, I know, but it's relevant to theartsdesk, and wouldn't start automatically!) that plays while you navigate the site but doesn't involve Flash, popups or frames they'd be very happy!

Apart from those, we've been been quite lucky in that most of their requests have been easily fulfilled through the power of Joomla and its various extensions. Almost every requirement has been a simple case of switching on, tweaking some CSS and letting them play - I often find myself building functionality for them during meetings and it's always a pleasure to end a meeting with only a tiny to-do-list because you've done it all while you were chatting!

8) I hear the site won a few awards ...

The site has received some fantastic feedback and recognition - BBC Radio 5 nominated it alongside Google Streetmaps and Spotify as one of the top 5 essential sites of 2009! The Telegraph Online voted it as the number 4 in their selection of the best cultural websites, and the Independent put it among the top 25 music websites. Particularly gratifying though was the reception we received from Joomlaworks when we launched the site built with their K2 component - the screengrab still sits at the top of their article about K2 sites that stand out.

The site receives 2000 visitors per day, predominantly within the UK (75%), followed by the USA (11%). 62% come via the search engines, and it's always fascinating to see which reviews are trending each week. I think these stats are quite impressive given that nothing has been spent on marketing, and the only ongoing SEO is done onsite by the journalists with the simple tools that JCE editor makes so easy.

9) What's next for 3B Digital?

Well, party due to my overactive Twitter account I've really enjoyed becoming more involved with some of my Joomla heroes, regularly chatting with Brian Teeman and Fotis Evangelou among others, and hope to meet more of you at the J and Beyond international Joomla conference in Germany this May/June. As a company, we've never been more excited about the future - digital marketing seems to be an industry that is riding a wave right now - - warning, massive exaggeration coming up - companies aren't advertising in print, TV or radio anymore, and online spend is only going one way - up! As more and more people want more functionality and performance from their web presence we're seeing the Internet grow up, and those of us developing and designing within it are having to rise to the challenge!

About This Interview

Steve is a member of Open Source Matters board which helps the Joomla team keep the project running smoothly. He runs Open Source Training.

Do you know of a major or particularly interesting site that we should feature here? Email your suggestions to steve.burge@opensourcematters.org. Be sure to include:

• The website URL
• Why the site is interesting
• An email address for the developer