The InfoChange India website which has been under development for the last 5 months went live today ( Monday, 14th April 2008) Initially the site was partly Database driven for some part ( News articles ) but was mainly static JSP.  The site was converted to Joomla.

www.infochangeindia.org is one of India’s most-visited online resource bases on rights and development issuescurrently logging an average of 2,000 visitors every day. 

InfoChange News & Features is managed by the Centre for Communication and Development Studies (CCDS), a social change resource centre that uses innovative communication strategies to strengthen civil society and citizens’ action for social justice, human rights, sustainable development and accountable governance.

A lot of Custom development was done to make the Joomla CMS suitable for use for such a large News site & to suit their specific requirements , layouts & looks. Extensive crosslinking between Joomla Content using relationships was implemented to render the Site content in never before thought of ways. Besides extensive modifications to the content component, a lot of modifications went into everyday components like RS Gallery, Community builder, Seyret, Weblinks, Acajoom to name a few.

 ' Microsites ' a whole new way of displaying content in Joomla was developed allowing aggregation of content from accross sections & caqtegories to be displayed as one Microsite based on certain keywords.

Read on to know more about the exciting new extensions developed for the Infochange site & new features introduced in to Joomla like 'PDF-XGen' , Submit content, Custom User Home Page, User Custom RSS etc.  

Another new extension 'PDF-XGen' a extension for the Joomla 1.0 series which uses DOM PDF ( PHP5 compatible only) to render better PDFs from Joomla with better rendered images & in general better translation of HTML to PDF. Additionally the component can create ebooks of entire sections, categories or a collection of articles. 

'Submit  Content '  a simple but effeective extension to better manage submitted content in Joomla was developed to allow the infochange webmaster to better manage submitted articles. Allows users to submitted content as HTML like Joomla but additionally allows attachment of files which is what most Infochange authors have been used to. 

Some other interesting Features that were developed were 'User Custom Home Page' Community builder plugin which allows the user to customise content from what all sections can be shown on the Home Page. A 'You are missing' articles plugin shows the user the articles he's missing ( From sections removed from Home Page) .

The Custom User RSS Plugin for CB & based on RD RSS allows the user to build his own custom Rss feed from the site content.