Friday, February 28, 2014

Content Management with Joomla

Opening screen of my Joomla site

As part of my quest to control the world, or, at least my bits of the web, I wanted to learn more about content management systems.

I have used content management systems extensively, both for personal and work sites. This blog for example is written in the Blogger content management system. It provides a lot of the things I like:
  • I can add post anywhere, from any platform
  • All the new posts are styled automatically
  • I can choose when to deploy the new content, if at all
  • I can choose when to retire content
  • I can share the content with other sites
I have used others too, Liferay and Wordpress for example. I have learned a lot about manipulating the css and javascript to control the presentation in those systems.

But what I want to learn more about is controlling the back end nuts and bolts of a content management system. Controlling the actual templates and structures of sites built in content management systems.

So I installed joomla in a subdirectory of my regular web site. And then, with the help of a book or two, and a lot of good information on the web, I learned how to build up the basic components of the underlying joomla template. It took me a while to understand it, but now I get it!

You can see the site in it's current form here. I will continue to add content as I have time.