Over the past couple of weeks I have been attempting to revamp my website. I found a tool that in theory should help me do that. It’s called Joomla. It’s an open source database/document management/website tool.
There are many, and I do mean many great plug-ins and add-ins for this monster. From blogging to e-commerce, this ones got you covered.
However, there is one problem. I don’t have any extensive experience with these systems and way this product works. It relies heavily on server side scripting languages and protocols such as PHP. So I am starting from scratch with this one. The only way I learn something like this, is to dig my head into it and see what happens when I click this or delete that.
That has been easier said than done. Until this week, from what I knew it couldn’t be ran on a home computer. I thought it had to be used on a web server (at least a computer with a server OS). I found a program that emulates that your computer is indeed a server, it’s called WAMP5. With that installed I could play with Joomla to my heart’s content.
I’m starting to learn more and more about the software every day, and I think that within a few months, a new website for LML Video Services will be born.
I just need to figure out a few more problems first. It seems that my hosting service, Infosaic Technologies, has some strict guidelines for things such as these, many of the plug-ins and add-ins will not install correctly and it seems to be a permissions type error. The tech guys had to actually install the software for me. I keep prodding to see how I can get them to help me, but that’s an ongoing process. I don’t want to leave them, as they’ve been good (and cheap) to me over the past 2 years.
If I don’t get the hosting problems resolved, there must be another way. Hopefully I can find it.
Just stumble upon your post and feel like just dropping a few words here. Since you are trying out open source cms, perhaps you would want to also check out Drupal which takes a little more time to pickup as compared to Joomla (joomla documentation is kinda scattered), but it is worth every bit of your time if you ever able to master the program, it is much more flexible and powerful than Joomla, you can virtually built any type of website with Drupal.
Good luck and happy learning.
Do you really need all the services that Joomla offers? Do you need any of them? It might be overkill for what you want to do. But then again, I don’t know exactly what your plans for the site are, so I might be off-base.
B, I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do, but I know it’s going to be big and need the flexibility and expandiblity that Joomla offers.
It lets me do things without manually changing every page on my site as well.