Some elements of a project feel important. A nice-looking and easy-to-use homepage billboard displayer is one such thing. Such a design feature wouldn't be worth anything, however, if the HTML / CSS didn't render properly on the user's browser. In reality, the sophisticated extensions that bring flashy features to a TYPO3 site are just the cherry on top of the sundae. The sundae itself is the good, compliant, and accessible HTML / CSS.

Also among the requirements was the rotating billboard extension on the homepage. The extension needed to be able to rotate through varying layouts (1-, 2- or 3- images per layout) and through images within each image slot in a layout. This non-random rotation gives each image equal visibility on the homepage. These complex rotation requirements were to be simplified for the user with TYPO3's flexible backend table configuation array (TCA).

While a simple PHP script could handle rotation of images, TYPO3's table configuration array allowed for a simple, organized approached to adding images and creating layouts for the billboard extension. The site administrator can add images based on their type (size), then select images for a layout. With the power of the TCA, there's no chance that an image of the incorrect size with go in a given slot (which would break the layout). These kind of preventative measures are valuable to site admins and content editors.

Last, and certainly not least, is the creation of XHTML transitional and CSS-styled web documents (from Photoshop documents) that look good in all modern browsers (IE 6+/Windows, Firefox 1.5.x/All platforms, Firefox 1.0.x/All platforms, Opera 7+/All platforms, Safari/Mac) is no small task, but one that is often overlooked. The assumption is often that if the webpages are mocked up the job is nearly done. This couldn't be further from the truth. While Cast Iron Coding can do TYPO3 implementation, we also can do just HTML / CSS if you're using another CMS or have other plans for your site.

In additional to fine-tuning the HTML / CSS, the Tides Foundation website needed a hearty dose of Javascript to make sure everything looked right--the page background image needed to line up with the background images of the content areas in the foreground--and to add some bells and whistles--the text size widget for instance.