Our showcase
Show us your site, tell us your story
Inviting all Canberra Joomla gurus to show their site here and tell us their story. We've all been there and done that with the trials and tribulations of building a Joomla website ... learning all the tricks of the trade. How about you show us your site (or your most memorable if you've built more than one) and tell us a story or two about what you went through. Was there some problem you solved? Some wonderful new thing you learnt? Show and tell us here.
Contact me here to find out how.
Princess Fiona
Co-Convener
Canberra Joomla User Group
Ethical Rights website story
My expertise is in critical thinking, rational argumentation and science, and my passions include, amongst other things, advocacy of individual rights, ethical behaviour and euthanasia, and exposing the hypocrisy of religion and its discrimination and indoctrination.
So, as a content creator (and not a web developer), it seemed logical that I develop a website (at www.ethicalrights.com ) containing all my articles, including The Bibbble (intelligent people would view this as a light satire of standard religious texts). My web guru friends advised I should use Joomla!
And the development of the website was two weeks of hard yakka in January.
First there was the testing using the Joomla! test site. Then the BITNAMI download of Joomla!, finding a webhost, and using fantastico and cpanel on a webserver.
Joomla! ‘Easy’ said my guru friends. Joomla! is easy if you do not want anything other than a very standard template, and you know exactly what your site will look like. What is wonderful about Joomla! is that it is simply extendable, so when your site grows and you need, say a forum, or you want a different style/template, Joomla can accommodate it. Quite excellent really. But if you want to change the header, footer, logo, colour schemes, module positions, etc then be prepared to do plenty of research to modify css and html, and be proficient at graphic design.
Then comes fun with php, Apache, MySQL (and something never quite works as described), ftp, backups of MySQL database and Joomla! files, images, favicons, logos, headers, extensions, RSS, search engine optimisation, and the Joomla! forum (thank you Joomla! community for the answers to many questions) as well as those eureka moments when I discovered my own solutions. I also learnt menu items are as important as the Joomla! websites say they are (there are also some good books out there, and they can save you time). And at the end change your domain to one that does not show your personal details on WHOIS (thanks Ron).
Ethics, Joomla! and caffeine, what a wonderfully potent combination!
David
Canberra Joomla User Group