Monday 9th February 2009 sees the launch of the new International Property Awards website. This journal entry's purpose is to briefly document its history and give thanks to all those who have been involved in the project.

The WayBackMachine documents the birth of [link] in April 2004. Then sponsored by Bentleys the site was table driven and image heavy. Infact it was not untill 2007 when I took over the sites operations that I set about migrating the site over to a CSS based design.

Now in 2009 the site had grown into multiple regions, with lots of duplicating data and other annoying issues such as the total lack of CMS.

So a site migration to Joomla! was brainstormed planned and implemented. Also the site has been split into three with the 'residential and commercial' websites coming into the fray. see - [link] & [link]

Next up for 2009/10 is the development of a user/winners backend application that will handle registrations, winners lists and more. So far we have a snippet of php that prints winners according to a set of supplied parameters but once this is in place it will become the next big task of integrating the winners lists into the users database.

Shout-outs:

Firstly to [link] for providing an immensely powerful CMS for free, without the Joomla! these websites wouldn't be possible. Thanks for all the support from its users in the forums.

Thanks for YooTheme (www.yootheme.com) for their most elegantly designed templates - the best on the web I would argue. They also provided many of the powerful mootool/joomla effects and UI improvements that you see working hard on our site. Great & quick forum support from the staff! good work girls and guys.

Gavick (www.gavick.com) Pro Tools for producing some nice freely available joomla! modules.

Community Builder (www.joomlapolis.com) for producing a heavyweight user management system. Again lots of really helpful people in the forums to help squash bugs and extend CBs functionality.

GTranslate ([link]) - a really easy to use Google powered translater for Joomla!

JoomlaPack - A great component for backing up joomla websites and restoring them with Kickstart another great php application.

VirtueMart - A powerful shopping cart platform for joomla!

Xamp - the site map tool for Joomla! websites

SHEF404 - monsterously good url rewriting plus loads loads more

JCE Editor - a great wysiwyg editor for Joomla!

EasySpace - for hosting our site

Hendus Strydom - for his valuable support especially with the php winners lists

Andrew Cockburn - for his support, humour and his ability to spot absolutely everything that i've done wrong,, cruel to be kind eh.

My mom - for feeding me and listening to me winge!

Chim and Chris for being around and buying me beer! cheers!

Me - for putting it all together in a neat package, otherwise known as a website! woop woop