Chris Higgins

Gentlemen,

Brilliant stuff. Thanks so much for your advice. Works a treat, and was super easy to get up and running...particularly for someone who knows bugger all about Javascript.

Thanks again.

I really like Fancybox for Wordpress, combined with Gravity Forms (probably the best WP forms plugin).

I usually create a custom page template called "lightbox", create the page as normal in Wordpress and assign the template to that page, then create an iFrame for the fancybox to link to.  Relatively easy.  Hope that helps.

A fellow web designer friend of mine has been battling with exactly the same problems you mentioned. His solution? Pay by the month websites. No upfront charges for the site, but you pay a monthly fee that covers your site, hosting and an allocated amount of support (30mins, 1hr, etc). You never "own" the site, but you own all of your data, media, comments, mailing list, etc. The packages are priced so that in around two years you've made the payments that would cover the standard upfront charge. At that point, he's happy to re-skin the site at no charge if you continue on with the payment plan.

There are a couple of reasons he went down this path. Mainly so that he could have a steady stream of regular income coming in each month. Rather than working from job to job, and getting paid in stages, often months apart, he knows that, for example, he has 50 clients on a £100 package, which gives him £5000 every month. The other main reason was because people were constantly calling up asking for fixes, edits and tweaks, usually because of a cock up that they had made. Now that everyone is paying for support, he can provide that service without worrying about losing time on other jobs.

Understandably, not for everyone, but seems to be working well for him.

Hi Kate,

Not sure if either of these will be perfect for what you're after, but we use DT Register for events and ticketing.  It's pretty powerful, but (like a lot of Joomla components) horrid to configure and lacking in some fairly necessary features.

For commenting, maybe K2?  Commenting is built in to the component.

I might be able to help you with some more info if you can expand on exactly what you're trying to achieve.

Cheers,

Chris

Thanks for this Chris, and apologies for the delayed reply.  I had thought I had come across an error using this code, as I was getting five little 'question mark inside diamond' icons on the home page, but I had another look at the code today and I'd accidentally put some extra characters in there.  Ooops!

Thanks again!  :-)