Site Credits

This site was made possible using some of these free & open source solutions from the internet.

Content

The text content on this website was compiled from a variety of sources:

  • Member images are supplied by the discounters themselves.
  • Region and town images, unless otherwise stated, are the the property of South African Tourism - www.southafrica.net
  • Images licenced under Creative Commons were sourced from

Development

Gugulethu Ntombela from Innovative Freelance Solutions cc has been responsible for the Joomla component & Module development, implementing some of the extra components needed and porting the template for the Joomla system.

Component Description
Region (com_region) The region component was designed to display all the regions in which Moola Magic has discounters. The regions Component is key in organising all the discounters.
Travel Guide (com_region)
---> Town (com_town) The town Component does as the region Component does except that it relies on the region Component for meaning. A town cannot exist before a region has been created for it.
Cape Town (com_town)
   
Discounter (com_discounter) The discounter Component displays all the discounters that are part of the Moola Magic discounter program. The main features include the ability to display two different types of discounters (accommodation & other) with two different views (list or 'teaser' view & full view)
---> Discounts (com_discounts) Discounts is a back end Component for inputting the different discounts offered by the Moola Magic discounters.
---> Facilities (com_facility) Facility is a back end Component for inputting all the accommodation facilities offered by all the accommodation type discounters
   
Moola Number System (com_heritage) The Moola numbers Component is designed for registered agents as a tool to track the cards they have in stock and then to sell them to travellers. Travellers details are then captured and discounters can query a card serial number to find if the card is valid or not and to whom the card was sold.

The Number system was probably the biggest challenge as it had to be integrated with few third party components for security.
   
Module Description
Navigation (mod_navigation) The Navigation module is what generates the code for the nice drop-down menus in the main navigation system. It was designed to work hand in hand with the discounter and regions components.

Aleksandar Vacic, www.aplus.co.yu provided the script and CSS fixes to make the system work in Internet Explorer 6. /*stupid IE6*/
Contextual links (mod_contextual) The contextual module works in the sidebar and looks at the page you might be on and provides contextual links to other pages you might be interested in. For example: if you are on looking at a Durban discounter the right hand column will display a travel guide link for the town and for the region and a list of all the other Durban discounters.

The mod_contextual module is critical to ease navigation around the Moola Magic website
   

Content Management System

The Moola Magic website has been built using the Joomla CMS. Joomla provided us with a stable environment in which to develop the features needed for the Backpacking South Africa website.

Currently the site is running on 1.0.15 Stable version of Joomla.

Design

The design of the website was done by myself using a base template from Styleshout. The template is the "enlightened" template and is available here as a free download.

Third Party Scripts and Components

Many of the nice accruements or jewelery of the site were sourced from the internet.

Resource Description
Greybox Initially we used Lightbox JS by Lokesh Dhakar and then we discovered greybox. Easy to use and good looking too.
Google Maps We used David Pollack's Component from the Joomla extention directory for the google maps implementation.
JACLPlus JACLPlus provided the Joomla back end user system with more functionality that allowed us to develop the number system.