jebsblog

I must admit that I am a bit threat-sensitive to monkeying around with the back end of servers. I’m not sure why I have this neurosis, but I fear that if I make a mistake that the whole Internet will come crashing down and five minutes later the “web police” will be pounding on my door.

The logical explanation of my phobia is that “things can go wrong” when you play around with web servers and when you develop with content management systems (CMS) like Joomla!, Drupal and Word Press, you’re bound to hit a few snags along the way. It’s happened to me before.

My strongest aversion is to upgrades, especially Joomla upgrades. This is probably due to the fact that a year or so ago when I upgraded this site from 1.0 to 1.5 the whole thing crashed and burned and I had to completely rebuild the site. So, I am a little gun shy…you understand.

Well I am feeling pretty cheeky today after launching a new revised site for the Maine Coalition to Fight Prostate Cancer. I had built their original site last summer using basic HTML and a free CSS template. It looked pretty good and I got lots of compliments which I redirected at the guy who did the CSS work. But the MCFPC folks were so impressed they wanted to push the envelope further and expand their site to a CMS.

I met with some of their board members and we talked about the design at length. And then, once they had agreed to the plan, the moment of truth came. Now I had to rebuild the site.

My first decision was deciding which CMS to use. As this site would likely involve the use of one or more volunteers serving as authors and editors, I liked the fact that Joomla had a pretty user-friendly WYSIWYG content editor. Yes, I know you can install TinyMCE or some other editor in Drupal, but I’ve had lots of problems getting those to work well over the year. In the meantime, Joomla’s editor works quite nicely “out of the box.” So, Joomla it was.

Next chore was finding a suitable template with colors that matched the original. Thanks to the good folks at Joomlashack, I was able to get a nice pro template and install it pretty quickly. The colors were pretty close to the old design and the MCFPC folks seemed to like the beta site that I put up.

It had been several years since I rolled out a new Joomla install and I was pleased that the latest iteration of v1.5 installed quickly and easily. There have been a number of back-end features which have experienced major improvements. The entire media management system is much improved and will make it very easy for novices to add images to their new “articles.”

In the process I learned a lot more about the back-end of Joomla and have been pretty impressed.

So now I really want Drupal and Joomla and Word Press to get married and have a little baby called…DroomlaPress…or JoompalPress….or WorDrumla…

I’ll stop now…you got the point.

~j