NASS Credits

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This site would not be possible without the following innovative software creations from folks around the work.  To all, Thank You.

  • Joomla! The free, open-source content management system (CMS) and application framework. We've chosen to use the Joomla 3.10 version because of the wide community support and will migrate to Joomla 4.x  This vibrant volunteer and commercial community makes this NASS Sundial website possible.
  • Akeeba Backup is legendary and provides free administrative core tools for backup and restoration created by Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos. Many of us go back to the Amiga computer and "Kickstart" to boot up our system, and Akeeba provides a bootstrap way of quickly restoring backup files for site restoration.  This provides one of several "safety nets" to ensure that the NASS Sundial site is always available
  • All Video Share by mrvinoth  provides a simple but very effective way to incorporate a video and audio server, capable of displaying many different formats.  Video of sundials is now a very important graphic medium. Thanks to all who make All Video Share.
  • Attachments is a very useful component by Jonathan Cameron allowing pdf and other content to be attached to articles. The component and all plugins are installed in a single, easy step.  This provides download material management to our members and the public.
  • Balbooa Forms is a very friendly component for creating all kinds of forms.  We chose Balbooa for the construction of our Sundial Registry and ease of implementing ReCaptcha submit protection.
  • PhocaCart is a very complete shopping component offering easy definition of products and shopping categories. NASS may not have a massive offering, but our collection of Compendium back issues and other vital articles in The Repository, historic sundial publications from the 17th and 18th century in the Shadow Catcher Series, and a thorough documentation of analemmatic sundials and their amazing modern variants is avalable in The Analemmatic Sundial Sourcebook.
  • JCE is an powerful content editor for Joomla, providing many office-like functions that makes formatting and image insertion simple.  Toggles between text and html views, allowing control over the text and image presentations. JCE comes as an easy to install package free under the GNU license.
  • Maxi Menu CK by Cédric KEIFLIN is a very flexible menu system for displaying the NASS menu options.  This menu system has many options.
  • NetBeans, the (Java) Integrated Development Environment or IDE. It works very well with PHP and has helped track down several elusive bugs in the development of the NASS Registry components.  Thanks to all the NetBean code developers and to Oracle, who underwrites the cost.
  • Page_Peel_Banner is a  nice, lightway way of advertising our "Join NASS" page.  Love the way we can insert images into the peel.
  • SigPlus Gallery by Levente Hunyadi provides a balance between simplicity and the ability to offer detailed sundial images... hundreds of them. SigPlus offers an impressive set of feature, including automatic thumbnail and gallery preview image creation. Images in a gallery folder can be displayed in fixed or flow layout, on a slider or carousel/rotator, or can blend using a fancy transition effect.  NASS uses SigPlus to display the thousands of sundial images in the NASS Sundial Registry of North America.  Great software.
  • Sourcerer from Regular Labs very nicely solved the problem of embedding Javascript into articles for the creation of dynamic solar calculators, sundial angle generators, sundial drawing routines and interpreting the code for the Google Map of North American Sundials  By using  Sourcerer tags it's easy to use any Joomla editor to create PHP, HTML, and Javacript codes scripts embedded in articles. Regular Labs has done a great job and they provide very good documentation.