It’s been a caffeine-crazed, pizza-fuelled month, but listentoafrica.com is finally ready for launch. It’s still very much in beta (we’re ironing out bugs and adding new functionality), so if you have any thoughts or notice any foibles, now would be an excellent time to let us know – please comment away.

I’ll introduce the Listen to Africa expedition soon (for now, have a look around the about section ) but, while it’s fresh in my mind and because it’s been quite a journey in its own right, I thought I’d begin with an introduction to the website – not least because the website has been built on a free platform, using a free theme and free plugins, and I’d like to thank the developers and the community for building stuff that even a confirmed non-programmer like me can cajole into behaving like a website. So apologies to the non-techies.

A few months ago, when we were talking about the journey across Africa we’re now about to start, we decided we wanted it to centre around recording sound. Partly, audio was on our minds because, living on an off-the-grid narrowboat, our electricity-based entertainment was almost entirely supplied by an old battery-powered radio. Mostly, it seemed an appropriate and powerful way to communicate from a continent that has so much to say and is so rarely heard outside of its own borders.

So we wanted a website that would provide a platform for our sound recordings. And, since I got a little addicted to blogging during my time at Greenpeace, there would be a blog. And, because Huw is (in my opinion) a talented photographer, there should be a gallery . We wanted more than “just a blog”.

I looked into several open source CMS’s (content management systems) out there. I discarded Drupal , which I know to be lovely, because of my then non-existent PHP skills, and because of the whole sledgehammer / nut thing, and WordPress for being “just a blog”. I settled on Joomla! .

Having built v0.1 of the website entirely in Wetherspoon pubs (because of the wifi and electricity! Tsk) during a month-long boat trip last summer, I lost all the data (yes, I know…).

When I recently started rebuilding the website from scratch, I looked afresh at the CMS’s out there and realised WordPress could probably do everything we wanted it to, and might be better suited to my lack of technical capabilities. After a month of playing around, I’m a convert.

So here we are. As a thank you to the developers, and in case anything I’ve learnt might be of use to somebody, somewhere, these are the themes and plugins we’ve used:

We chose the Branford Magazine theme (based on the lovely Mimbo and Revolution themes) and hacked it in all sorts of ways, including adding a left sidebar and creating a few new templates.

For the map , which shows our general route and pulls in geotagged blogs, galleries, audio files and Twitter posts, I decided against embedding a simple Google Map. There seemed to be too many restrictions on displaying KML files – and I was especially unhappy about the multiple placemark listings that appeared when displaying countries (polygons) along our potential route (I battled with multiGeometry and Folder tags for a while but no dice). I wasn’t quite ready to roll up my sleeves and work out the Google Maps API so I tried a few different WordPress / Google map plugins, and kept coming back to Geo Mashup .

After trying out a few versions, I settled on 1.2 Beta 1 , which has lots of new features, including support for the Google Earth browser plugin. It also lets you pull in multiple KML / GeoRSS files, easily geotag each post and display placemarks by WordPress category, among other things. The documentation and support are excellent, and the implementation guide at bioneural.net was invaluable to me.

After fumbling about in the dark with shapefiles for a while, I built the proposed route by editing down the World Borders KMZ file . I replaced the standard category icons with icons from famfamfam . (The geotag icon is from, um, Geotag Icon and the bicycle icon from Icons Land – all released under Creative Commons .)

While the map automatically pulls in geotagged blogs, galleries and audio files through the plugin, we also wanted it to pull in our latest location (the bicycle icon), which we wanted to be able to send by SMS; we’ll often be away from internet for weeks at a  time. As a Twitter addict, I decided to use Twibble , which outputs a KML or GeoRSS feed on Tweets containing a latitude and longitude. Our non-geotagged Tweets are sent to Twitter by SMS, and then pulled into the blog using Twitter Tools (which also sends blog posts back to Twitter, without resulting in the implosion of the universe).

The galleries use NextGEN gallery – a wonderful plugin with slightly patchy official documentation, so big thanks to David Potter for his brilliant walkthrough . NextGEN displays galleries as both slideshows and thumbnails, and includes viewing effects like Thickbox . It comes with several sidebar widgets but, as they link to the image rather than to the gallery, I borrowed the NextGEN styles and created our own gallery widget.

We’re using the Podcasting plugin for the podcasts. The contact form is powered by cforms , the social networking buttons by SocioFluid (we added the email button), the wall by WP Wall , the breadcrumbs by CMS Navigation and the comment subscriptions by Subscribe To Comment .

At the back end, we’re using both Advanced Excerpt (for home page excerpts) and The Excerpt Reloaded (on category pages), Askimet , BadBehaviour , Executable PHP Widget , Headspace 2 , Page Category Plus, Plugin Central , RSS Footer , Simple Tags , Slayer’s Custom Widgets , Tiny MCE Advanced , Widgets Reloaded and Wordpress Database Backup . The mobile site is powered by MobilePress .

So that’s the platform more or less built. Now we just have to cycle 24,000 kilometres across Africa carrying huge amounts of equipment , and start gathering beautiful content…

Update 26/04/2009: The site has evolved and we’ve changed a lot of the plugins / tools we’re using since I wrote this (eg we’re now using Brightkite rather than Twibble to text our current location, because it doesn’t require a fancy phone). Check the about the website page for an up-to-date version.

It’s been a caffeine-crazed, pizza-fuelled month, but listentoafrica.com is finally ready for launch. It’s still very much in beta (we’re ironing out bugs and adding new functionality), so if you have any thoughts or notice any foibles, now would be an excellent time to let us know – please comment away.

I’ll introduce the Listen to Africa expedition soon (for now, have a look around the about section ) but, while it’s fresh in my mind and because it’s been quite a journey in its own right, I thought I’d begin with an introduction to the website – not least because the website has been built on a free platform, using a free theme and free plugins, and I’d like to thank the developers and the community for building stuff that even a confirmed non-programmer like me can cajole into behaving like a website. So apologies to the non-techies.

A few months ago, when we were talking about the journey across Africa we’re now about to start, we decided we wanted it to centre around recording sound. Partly, audio was on our minds because, living on an off-the-grid narrowboat, our electricity-based entertainment was almost entirely supplied by an old battery-powered radio. Mostly, it seemed an appropriate and powerful way to communicate from a continent that has so much to say and is so rarely heard outside of its own borders.

So we wanted a website that would provide a platform for our sound recordings. And, since I got a little addicted to blogging during my time at Greenpeace, there would be a blog. And, because Huw is (in my opinion) a talented photographer, there should be a gallery . We wanted more than “just a blog”.

I looked into several open source CMS’s (content management systems) out there. I discarded Drupal , which I know to be lovely, because of my then non-existent PHP skills, and because of the whole sledgehammer / nut thing, and WordPress for being “just a blog”. I settled on Joomla! .

Having built v0.1 of the website entirely in Wetherspoon pubs (because of the wifi and electricity! Tsk) during a month-long boat trip last summer, I lost all the data (yes, I know…).

When I recently started rebuilding the website from scratch, I looked afresh at the CMS’s out there and realised WordPress could probably do everything we wanted it to, and might be better suited to my lack of technical capabilities. After a month of playing around, I’m a convert.

So here we are. As a thank you to the developers, and in case anything I’ve learnt might be of use to somebody, somewhere, these are the themes and plugins we’ve used:

We chose the Branford Magazine theme (based on the lovely Mimbo and Revolution themes) and hacked it in all sorts of ways, including adding a left sidebar and creating a few new templates.

For the map , which shows our general route and pulls in geotagged blogs, galleries, audio files and Twitter posts, I decided against embedding a simple Google Map. There seemed to be too many restrictions on displaying KML files – and I was especially unhappy about the multiple placemark listings that appeared when displaying countries (polygons) along our potential route (I battled with multiGeometry and Folder tags for a while but no dice). I wasn’t quite ready to roll up my sleeves and work out the Google Maps API so I tried a few different WordPress / Google map plugins, and kept coming back to Geo Mashup .

After trying out a few versions, I settled on 1.2 Beta 1 , which has lots of new features, including support for the Google Earth browser plugin. It also lets you pull in multiple KML / GeoRSS files, easily geotag each post and display placemarks by WordPress category, among other things. The documentation and support are excellent, and the implementation guide at bioneural.net was invaluable to me.

After fumbling about in the dark with shapefiles for a while, I built the proposed route by editing down the World Borders KMZ file . I replaced the standard category icons with icons from famfamfam . (The geotag icon is from, um, Geotag Icon and the bicycle icon from Icons Land – all released under Creative Commons .)

While the map automatically pulls in geotagged blogs, galleries and audio files through the plugin, we also wanted it to pull in our latest location (the bicycle icon), which we wanted to be able to send by SMS; we’ll often be away from internet for weeks at a  time. As a Twitter addict, I decided to use Twibble , which outputs a KML or GeoRSS feed on Tweets containing a latitude and longitude. Our non-geotagged Tweets are sent to Twitter by SMS, and then pulled into the blog using Twitter Tools (which also sends blog posts back to Twitter, without resulting in the implosion of the universe).

The galleries use NextGEN gallery – a wonderful plugin with slightly patchy official documentation, so big thanks to David Potter for his brilliant walkthrough . NextGEN displays galleries as both slideshows and thumbnails, and includes viewing effects like Thickbox . It comes with several sidebar widgets but, as they link to the image rather than to the gallery, I borrowed the NextGEN styles and created our own gallery widget.

We’re using the Podcasting plugin for the podcasts. The contact form is powered by cforms , the social networking buttons by SocioFluid (we added the email button), the wall by WP Wall , the breadcrumbs by CMS Navigation and the comment subscriptions by Subscribe To Comment .

At the back end, we’re using both Advanced Excerpt (for home page excerpts) and The Excerpt Reloaded (on category pages), Askimet , BadBehaviour , Executable PHP Widget , Headspace 2 , Page Category Plus, Plugin Central , RSS Footer , Simple Tags , Slayer’s Custom Widgets , Tiny MCE Advanced , Widgets Reloaded and Wordpress Database Backup . The mobile site is powered by MobilePress .

So that’s the platform more or less built. Now we just have to cycle 24,000 kilometres across Africa carrying huge amounts of equipment , and start gathering beautiful content…

Update 26/04/2009: The site has evolved and we’ve changed a lot of the plugins / tools we’re using since I wrote this (eg we’re now using Brightkite rather than Twibble to text our current location, because it doesn’t require a fancy phone). Check the about the website page for an up-to-date version.