The Improvement Service site was built during December 2005 & January 2006. It uses the highly-respected Joomla! open-source Content Management System (CMS) and a number of add-on components to provide additional functionality. Special emphasis was placed on the collaborative nature of the site - every opportunity is given for both regular users and visitors to submit new ideas, documents, items of news, links and so on.

The W3C Markup Validation Service (v0.7.1) passes the site as being valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional. Watchfire WebXACT (Watchfire are the makers of Bobby) passes the site in its General, Quality and Priority 1 Accessibility checks.

Joomla! itself is written in the PHP language and uses the MySQL database - it is thus platform-independent, although typically is installed on a Linux-based server running the Apache Web Server. The add-on components are developed and made available by members of the active open-source community which surrounds Joomla!

• Made Your Web Template provides the overall look-and-feel for the site.
  • Marc Hinse, Ladm
  • Version 1.2 (08.08.2005)
    
• AkoComment lets users comment on content items.
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  • Version 2.0 (12.11.2004)
    
• Bookmarks manages external links, with optional thumbnails, categorisation, etc.
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  • Version 2.6-Plus (09.02.2005)
    
• Community Builder extends Joomla!'s user management with extra information about the users.
  • JoomlaJoe and This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
  • Version 1.0 RC2 (16.11.2005)
    
• DOCMan is a powerful Document Management system.
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  • Version 1.3.0 RC2 (8.2005)
    
• Events Calendar is an Event Management system.
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  • Version 1.2 (25.11.2004)
    
• JCE is a WYSIWYG content editor.
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    • Thanks to Ryan for developing a working DocLink component for the site launch.
  • Version 1.0.4 (20.3.2006)
    
• Joomap is a site map utility.
  • Daniel Grothe, mic
  • Version 2.02 (26.03.2006)
    
• joomlaXplorer is a File Management utility.
  • QuiX Project; This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
  • Version 1.3.3 (27.2.2006)
    
• Joomlaboard Forum is a Discussion Forum system.
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  • Version 1.1.2 Stable (01.05.2006)
    
• YaNC is a Newsletter Management system.
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  • Version 1.4 Beta 3 (09.30.2005)

Many thanks to all of the above, without whom the site could not have been developed so quickly and economically (maybe not at all).

Many of the components were used unchanged, but several had to be modified at the source-code level to fulfil the site's requirements, especially the template and document management system (the latter in order to support the additional site-specific meta data fields). Happily, the open-source community encourages this approach.

The Improvement Service community sites (e.g. Community Planning & Health Improvement) are built in a similar fashion to the above, but on a smaller scale, because they use the central document management and discussion forum facilities of the main site.

We are now using Joomla! 1.0.8.