We Launched!

Well it is now official. We launched a new online publication. Yawn you say? Well how about this? We also sold ad space for three months! Now that makes us official.

At ExhibitorsDaily.com we are judiciously incorporating elements of open-source software with some cherry-picked, commercial offerings. It all needed to be compatible with our Mac OS X platform of servers and laptops. Basically a MAMP stack. Macintosh, Apache, mySQL and PHP. Or, maybe I should have said WoMAMP and throw my support in for WebObjects. It really is a nice environment and one which I believe to be competitive advantage.

This advantage is key. It allows for us to be able to choose the proper tool for the job within its Internet context. Is the application or website all just the usual? Or is it to be a completely custom and scalable subscription application? Well with the above toolsets developed and deployed on OS X, well, let's just say, your IT department will be small, mean, lean and efficient.

Back to ExhibitorsDaily.com. For the underlying CMS we decided on Joomla 1.5. It's new architecture looked well thought out and we already had experience with Joomla1.0. We knew this would limit the components we could add as it is a brand new release and breaks the majority of third party components. But we didn't need many, and the ones we did were either available or in beta.

An example of a nice clean component we found was the Mosets directory component.

Next it was on to advertising. Advertising and the managing of it is very important. After doing a bit of research we finally stumbled upon OpenX. This was great open source ad server. Open X has a steep learning curve due to its byzantine user interface. But once you start learning to think like the developers, it still only sort of makes sense. Anyway, it is powerful, complete, and a darn professional application. It offers full control and reporting of all your web ads.

Now I needed to integrate this OpenX with Joomla 1.5. I found the glue in a module and plugin called Jumi. Jumi is nifty as it allows you to run any arbitrary code in Joomla. This allowed us unlimited zones and reporting for our advertisers. This is a service our advertisers love.

Well next on our plate is the redesign with a more subdued look. Once that migration is complete we will be able to provide our viewers and advertisers more content and opportunities. Well, that is the theory at least. Stay tuned as we move forward as I still have a lot of features and services to unveil to our community in the coming months.