Fishing Community Web Site

[swese44]

Hello all! I would greatly appreciate some feedback on my newest web site!

FellowFishermen.com

FellowFishermen.com took me about six months to complete and is so far the most complex Joomla site I've created. There are still many features I am planning for the future, but here are the current features:


Social Networking - All the standard community features that JomSocial provides (picture and video sharing, friends, profiles, groups, discussions, etc.).
Catches - Members can keep a record of their fish, showing off their catches with photos and actual locations. The catch records component is also integrated with JomSocial, adding user points and links in the Activity Stream and placing a JomSocial App on their profile page showing their recent catches and their friends' recent catches.
Business Directory - Sobi2 powers a directory for fishing charters, guides, trips and tackle shops. Business owners can create listings for their charter, guide service, etc. People can then browse the listings and check out fish caught by these businesses.
Maps of Fishing Spots - This is my favorite feature! When a user adds a new catch, they can specify GPS coordinates of where they caught the fish, or place a marker on a map (powered by Google Maps API). Then if they choose to share the fishing spot, their catch will be displayed on a world map, where people can zoom in anywhere in the world to see where fish are being caught!
Maps of Businesses - I've also integrated a similar Google Maps application with Sobi2, so that people can find fishing businesses by location, scanning maps anywhere in the world.
Blogs - MyBlog allows any registered user to keep their own personal fishing blog, which is integrated with JomSocial.
Weather - eWeather, powered by The Weather Channel, provides weather on the site. Users can set their location to get weather specific to them.
Twitter Integration - When a user adds a new catch record, a cron job will post their details on the FellowFishermen Twitter account (if at least one picture was uploaded for the catch). It will give the type and weight of the fish, and link to the user's Twitter account if they specified it in their profile.


Features planned for the future:
Fishing Information - There will be sections and categories of articles teaching people how to fish certain types of fish, how to set up tackle and bait, how to tie knots, how to identify fish, etc.
Facebook App Integration - I am working on a Facebook App that will show off a person's catches on their Facebook profile page, and place links in their Facebook activity stream. This will use JomSocial's Facebook Connect feature to link the two sites.
AdSense Revenue Sharing - I'm toying with the idea of sharing revenue on blog pages, but I haven't made any decisions yet.


That's FellowFishermen.com in a nutshell. I am aware that there are some CSS display issues in Internet Explorer. The Login dropdown panel doesn't work properly in IE7, I'm not sure if it works in EI8 or not. I work on a Mac, so if anybody has any ideas why it doesn't work I would love to hear it. Please also let me know if you find any other errors in Internet Explorer if that's your browser of choice.

I'd love to hear any other feedback, good or bad. I have tough skin, you're not going to hurt my feelings so bring it on.

Thanks!
P.J.
Emergination, LLC

FellowFishermen.com

[NicMason]

Hi PJ,

The site looks fantastic! It's similar to the type of community sites I'm working on.

I just viewed it in ie8, and the drop-down menus seem to work fine.

JomSocial looks good on your site. How is it working out? Did you need to customise it much?

I was almost going to use it, but I didn't like the excess of JavaScript nor the style of the image galleries. I also thought it was a bit pricey for a piece of software that seems incomplete, and something I would have to put quite a bit of custom work into.

I'd love to see how your Facebook Connect works with posting the member's catches.

Overall, very inspiring work!

Cheers,

Nic

[swese44]

Thanks Nic. What about the "Login" button at the top right, does the control panel pop down correctly when you click it? In IE7 the header content stays at the top instead of being pushed down and I can't figure out why.

As far as JomSocial goes I am very happy with it. The only customization I've done is CSS and a few background images. Looking back now I realize that I edited the JomSocial CSS instead of overwriting its rules in my own CSS file, so when I upgrade to a new version of JomSocial it will overwrite my changes. Luckily I didn't actually change that much and it shouldn't take me too long to fix again next time.

I definitely don't think it's too pricey. I think we all get too used to "Open Source" and "Free Software". I fully support this, I write free software for others to use and I love being able to use Joomla and extensions for free. However, if you're building a web site for profit, you probably need to spend the time or money to really make it great. If I had to hire a developer to create a custom component like JomSocial it would cost me thousands of dollars. It would take me weeks or months to develop it on my own. Compared to other Joomla projects I've paid for, $150 is a steal, and it's all open source so I can edit anything I need to, so I don't have any complaints.

Anyway, we don't need to get into open source issues, they've been rehashed a million times. I'd love to hear any other feedback on the site. Thanks!

[NicMason]

Thanks Nic. What about the "Login" button at the top right...

No worries! Yep. Login works for me in ie8.

[Nick_P]

Wow!!
.........So it took you 6 months to do that. Well I must say, you just pooped in my cornflakes. Saying I'm a noobie is an understatement, more like a nub of a noob.
In your opinion could someone that looks at joomla as a foreign language in braile (thats me) even have a shot at making something even close to that?

Any tips as far as reference material whether it be books (joomla for dummies) or online articles.
That would help with creating a site as extensive as yours.

Or could I just buy your template??


Great work

[swese44]

Thanks Nick_P.

As far as skills required, you'll need to first get familiar with CSS. It's very important that you learn to create table-less designs and learn to build everything with Divs and CSS, and other elements besides tables.

For any front-end interaction, animation, validation, etc. you will need to learn JavaScript. Joomla comes packaged with MooTools, which is a JavaScript framework that gives you a bunch of cool JavaScript features like animation, Ajax, and lots of tools to access and manipulate page elements. FellowFishermen.com uses a lot of MooTools features. MooTools is easy to pick up if you know JavaScript.

And back to the meat and potatoes, PHP. I went to school for computer science, which is where I learned how to write code. A college degree certainly isn't necessary, but if you want to be a good programmer you'll have to spend a lot of time learning proper coding fundamentals. Once you've learned to write good code you can pick up any other language later on (I learned PHP on my own after college).

Sorry, the template isn't for sale. One way to get a great customized template is to draw up what you want your web site to look like. Once you know what you want, you can browse other templates to find something similar, then customize the HTML and CSS to fit your needs. You don't even need to know PHP to customize a template if you just need to change colors, images, HTML or CSS styles.

If you need a custom component built but you don't know PHP, you can always hire a freelance coder. I've posted a few projects at Joomlancers.com. You can always hire the cheapest bidder, but the final project will be crap. I found that out the hard way. If you care about your web site and you want it to be good, spend money and hire a good developer. I found a great coder out of Russia that I now use every time I need a Joomla component created that I don't have time to do myself. He charges about $20 an hour and his work is excellent. PM me if you would like his contact details.

Good luck!

[Ace2110]

I think that looks like the best site that I've seen created in my short time on this forum.

Congrats!

I think the more integration you can offer people the better off you'll be in the long term.

[hb7of10]

wow. very nice website, I worked on a similar project, but have not integrated nearly as much social media marketing, Obviously this was a big mistake - as I can see that is the most important part of your such a websites ultimate success!

Job well done!

[Resed]

Very interesting realized the idea of the fishing site. I really liked it!
Very good module Maps.
How can we implement the same module Maps?

Sorry for my English. I am from Russia.

[swese44]

Very interesting realized the idea of the fishing site. I really liked it!
Very good module Maps.
How can we implement the same module Maps?

Sorry for my English. I am from Russia.

Thanks. I built the maps in a custom component, it's tightly coupled with the other components on the site and I won't be distributing it.

[v2interactive]

VERY VERY nice! I LOVE your logo!

[Monstr]

I really like your site, and how you used Jomsocial, it looks really neat, and you utilized the Jom social component with your site flawlessly.

Kudos on the Site

[swese44]

Thanks guys. I held a logo design contest at 99designs.com for $250, you get a bunch of designers to submit logos and you get to give feedback and choose your favorite one.

I customized the JomSocial template by overwriting its CSS rules in my template's CSS file. That way my overwrite rules will always be there, even after reinstalling JomSocial every time I upgrade it. The JomSocial plugins/apps were actually pretty easy to create, JomSocial has a nice API that makes integrating other components pretty simple.

I'm actually building a full Facebook Application for FellowFishermen.com right now, using the Joomla framework and JomSocial's Facebook Connect feature. It's looking really cool, I'll let you guys know when it's complete.

[Monstr]

may I ask how you got the achievements plugin for jomsocial?
I have been looking for one of those forever , I found one for community builder but not jomsocial?

[newageroman]

great site! man that is inspiring! I would be tempted to work in hook or worm icon images somehow.

[swese44]

may I ask how you got the achievements plugin for jomsocial?
I have been looking for one of those forever , I found one for community builder but not jomsocial?

The entire Achievements system is something I designed from scratch. There is a custom PHP class which gets notified by other components (JomSocial, Kunena, JomComment, my custom voting system, Catch Records, authentication plugins, etc.) that certain events happened, then it counts up totals or whatever else is necessary to determine if different achievements should be awarded.

Once this system was in place, the easy part was creating the JomSocial plugin to display the Achieivements. JomSocial plugins are actually quite easy to create, the guys at Azrul did a great job there. You just copy the example plugin and have it create the HTML you need.

[joomfriend]

Wow! This is what I call an online community. You have got a great site. Congratulations.

About your members profile URL, don't you think that i would be a good practice to have them like this:

fellowfishermen.com/somebodysname

instead of:

fellowfishermen.com/community/somebodysname/cc-profile.html

It's just a suggestion.

Thanks