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We are thrilled to announce that we've launched a HUGE site we've been working on for the last few months, WineMaker Magazine.

WineMaker Magazine started in 1998, and it's about how to make wine at home, whether you start with fresh grapes, or whether you start with a kit.  The main goal for the website is to push subscriptions and sell back issues of the magazine.  The content surrounding that supports those goals.

Because the site supports a magazine, it should contain an issue-by-issue listing of all articles.  Some of these articles may be available online, while some articles might be listed, but purchasing a back issue is required to read it.

WineMaker's old site was supported by a custom content management system.  Content was tagged with many different topics and types.  Joomla doesn't support this natively, so we knew we needed to find a way to make that happen.

The big part of the story of this site is all about Bill, our Engineer Extraordinaire, and how he managed to get the content into the Joomla framework.

We used JoomSuite Content to manage the content. This allowed tagging of articles with multiple categories. It allowed us to view the content by issue or by a specific tag, and we could group tags into super-categories of information as well.  (For example, "equipment and gear" is a super-category of several tags.)

The site features a store, which is put together and run with VirtueMart. While Bill and I have built e-commerce sites together before (mostly with osCommerce), this was our first use of VirtueMart, and we were pretty pleased with its flexibility.

There is a photo gallery, courtesy of RSGallery 2, a product we've worked with several times.

MyBlog drives the blog on the website. There is currently one blogger, but we plan for more bloggers in the future.

 There's an e-newsletter driven by Constant Contact.  The site includes a subscribe box.

Bill wrote a few custom extensions as well. The Zip Code Locator is an outgrowth of Contacts4Web, a great utility that allows lists of contacts (name, company, etc) to be listed and formatted according to whatever parameters are desired.   There is a single zip code locator, but each module (where you type in your zip code) is programmed to search only certain tags, so that you only see suppliers, or only wine clubs, or only places to buy the magazine. However, if a company is both a supplier and sells the magazine, there's only one piece of data entry to do.

Finally, we made use of several standard Joomla extensions, such as the banner ad component/module, random image module, and the poll module.  Xmap drives the site map.

We hired some freelancers to work on the project, to clean up the HTML in the individual articles, to code a Sulfite Calculator in Flash, and to write the zip location part of the zip locator.

We are thrilled it's done!  Next step: using many of these same technologies on more sites launching this fall.  Watch this space for more information!