Over the last few years there's been a huge growth in the number of prebuilt components available to website designers and programmers, especially those written in the PHP programming language. It saves a great amount of time when you are able to create web applications from these, rather than writing them entirely from scratch, and allows far more to be provided for smaller budgets than would previously have been possible.

While its possible to keep abreast of most of the developments available in this area, its very difficult to be proficient in working with every available package. Spellbound websites specializes in customizing the Joomla content management system. Important advantages are:

• From the point of view of longevity of the website, there is a huge 3rd party development community. It will be very easy for any future developers to continue or update the site if needed.
• It's an extremely modular framework, which means that future website extensions wouldn't require starting from scratch and losing existing work. There are already hundreds of 3rd party components available and in the following list of proposed solutions you'll see that most can be provided by customising already existing components.
• From a maintainability viewpoint, Joomla 1.5 is written in PHP 5 which allows it to be object oriented and more modular right down to the source code. By embracing the most current programming methodology, it's then easier for any subsequent developers of a project to take over where a previous one left off.
• Considering security, the Joomla framework is updated several times each year to maintain integrity of, and provide advances in security. The security updates can be installed each time without changing the site content or presentation.

Other frameworks we use, are Viart and X-Cart for e-commerce, and Wordpress, which is a simpler content management system. Many standard, brochure-style websites are also still produced.

WordPress ( www.wordpress.org ) is a great framework for smaller websites. It started as a blogging application, but has evolved into a reliable publishing platform that's simpler to use that larger CMSes. A standard WordPress installation provides:

• the ability to edit existing website pages, including the upload of images,
• the ability to add further pages and manage menu items,
• a search function.

It can be extended with:

• protected pages available only to logged in users. If the page is navigated to by someone who hasn't logged in, they'll be presented with a login form instead, allowing registration and access to additional website content.
• forms
• a simple online shop
• a poll

Tailored / Customized components

Components and package code on the web are constantly being improved and released as improved versions. This is good, yet when it comes to customizing a component developed by others, it results in the need for a special handling.

If a component is customized by a party other than the original developers, then updates provided by them are unlikely to install correctly. This prevents an end-user with little programming knowledge from performing an installation themselves. The solution is to have the developer who performed the customization handle the upgrade, which is an easy solution, but should be noted as it will likely incur a charge.