jancancook.net

A few years ago I was running late on a Christmas present for my wife, so my daughter and I slapped together a Joomla site ([login to view URL]) for my wife to use while blogging about her cooking hobby. As of today, she is quite active in using it, and between the original limitations of what I set up and the content that she has on there, the site is getting cumbersome and in some cases (Header graphic...) is breaking down. I'm too busy to do this myself, and honestly I wouldn't do a good job -- I'm dangerously informed and woefully inexperienced, which is a bad, bad, bad, combination. What I would like is to update the site and surprise her later in August. The site is now in Joomla 1.5 and uses a plugin called SuperBlogger along with another plugin called PraiseFolio to handle her pictures and recipes. Here is what I want to do: 1.) Convert the existing site to a more robust and long-term platform. This could be Joomla again, or it could be Wordpress -- I really don't care. 1a.) We need to keep existing content. 1b.) I don't care at all about keeping existing links for SEF -- We basically did nothing with this before. 2.) The new site should have a more robust plugin or method for handling the recipes. Joomla 2.5 should be able to handle that within it's core functionality, but I am not sure. My wife is not technical, so if something like K2 could be implemented which forced every article into the same basic format, that would be best. 3.) I want to expand the structure of the site (We started this on the old one, but never implemented it...) so that it has the following sections for blogging. -- Food I Made (Needs to be able to easily add recipes. The other sections do not.) -- Food I Ate -- Books I Read -- Well, I Won't Do That Again... -- About Me 4.) The graphics on the site now are rudimentary, but my wife really likes the hand-drawn icons that my daughter made. If you need new icons, please tell me what they are for and I will get my daughter to make additional ones in the same style. 5.) The top header graphic (Logo?) is fine as-is. 6.) The top slideshow needs to be kept, but any plugin is fine. 7.) My wife likes the most recent comments on the side, so please keep that. 8.) We want to add a good SEF plugin to this or to make sure that the core SEF functionality is working well. 9.) We want to do a better job of pagination on the articles so that the site looks a bit cleaner and not so Joomla-y. 10.) We want to keep some modules at the bottom and left open so that we can add advertisements or links to other sites later. So, basically this is a conversion project with some very basic add-ons. Completion should be before the end of August, but before August 20 is even better.