Into the Wild Spaces

The Install Process

I wrote about the installation and upgrade process earlier and maintain that page up to date as I upgrade the site. In essence, it was a rather painless install process, thanks to my ISP, which made the Fantastico Cpanel script installer available for my use. Fantastico made it simple.

Why Joomla in the First Place?

I looked around quite a bit when I wanted to upgrade my site to dynamic, not static pages. And the first thing I decided was that the traditional blog interface wasn't for me. I write about too many different kinds of subject matter and need to be able to separate them, I hate the calendar approach to most blog archives and wanted a clean search interface for users interested in specific topics. I took a look at Mambo, but when I realized the open source developers that had created Mambo had evacuated the premises and opened shop as Joomla, it was clear where the rapid-paced development and improvement was going to be occurring. I also discarded the bulletin-board type interfaces like PHPBB, which are good but didn't suit the purposes of a content-generator like me, and products like Drupal, which are better equipped for other purposes in my opinion (though several excellent sites have chose Drupal to manage content).

I am still evaluating Joomla, trying to figure out how to best integrate the dynamic site with other content I had generated in static pages, and am still experimenting with things like wrappers, hard links, and simply redoing the site. Perhaps if I were a more competent PHP programmer I'd have been able to whip up something of my own design, but for now I'm stuck installing and modifying other people's products. Joomla, in my opinion, is the product that best enables me to create what I want -- dynamic content, RSS feeds, an easy search mechanism, meta data, hard links, links to static content, and more. The components that don't suit or interest me -- site log ins, polls, web link categories, and "picture of the day" content -- I simply disable.

Things I Like

Total control over the home page -- what goes up and in what order. I can even repost old articles if I like. I've done this for tech articles I've updated.

The ability to enter an article but set it to be posted at some future date. This is great for press releases and so on. I typically write up the article when it's on my mind and post-date it so that it is published at an appropriate moment.

Things I'd Like to See in a Future Version

Statistics on what search engine text is being input that leads to my site, i.e., "are people coming to my Kubuntu page because they're searching on Ubuntu and Java" or what?

An element in the images dialogue that allows me to deal with image widths. I use many images that are too wide for the article's column width and hot link them to the full size image. Doing so precludes my being able to use the MOSIMAGE tag. Instead, I use the full HTML markup for the image, which is easy for me, but less convenient than being able to deal with this issue directly in the otherwise-useful images dialogue.

Multiple image upload in the Media Manager. I get around this one by simply uploading my files directly with an FTP client, but if there were a way to batch upload files from the Media Manager -- even if were a hack like selecting a folder instead of a file -- that would speed things up for me.

Multiple Category Listings: This is a huge issue for the kind of themes my writing encompasses. I love Linux and work frequently with Nicaragua, so when it's time to write about how I helped bring Linux to Nicaragua back in 2001, how do I file it? Both audiences that read my work would be interested in the article, but for different reasons. There is only one system I know of that allows cross-filing and it is WordPress, but that software insists on a blog-type interface (archives by calendar date, for example) that didn't suit me. I understand the fundamental design limitation that database-driven sites face, and rumor has it that this feature is scheduled for a medium-term upgrade to the Joomla software system. But for me, the sooner, the better. In the meantime I make do with extensive use of metatags and the Related Content menu. It was exactly this kind of categorization question with my own personal files that drove me to Mac OS X, whose mind-blowingly-cool Spotlight technology took the pain out of deciding whether my article about Writing Opportunities at SAIS should go under WebPages or Writing or SAIS (for example). I hope Joomla follows suit.