well, the day has finally arrived, it’s time to move over to Joomla !
from now on these posts will go into my Joomla site
Wordpress is a great product and I continue to use it elsewhere, Joomla has a variety of page layouts and formats that make it more suitable for the type of sites that I now develop and work with.
Today was the day we can all do without. It goes without saying that it was total frustration but it has ended with success. There’s no doubt that you have to have persistence if you want to succeed with Joomla.
Today I was integrating easyphpcalendar (beware of ANYTHING that has easy in its name!) which is really straightforward with conventional html and php. In joomla it’s something else.
There are two ways to integrate easyphpcalendar into a Joomla site
Here are some things to ponder before you start.
Putting easyphpcalender into a wrapper on a Joomla site works very well. However, there is one massive proviso your need before you start. Joomla sites appear to have a server security mechanism that prevents them form running scripts that are not directly within the main directory. If you are puzzled by that here’s a simple explanation, if you don’t have the easyphpcalendar installed in a place where Joomla can access it you will get an error message saying that the file you tried to access does not exist. It looks like a server path issue, so I guess that there is a path problem. When I moved the whole installation of easyphpcalendar it worked fine.
Using a wrapper works just how you would expect. Make a php file that shows the calendar you want, view it with a browser, then insert it into a wrapper, Joomla shows it as an iframe and it works just how you expect. If there is a problem you may get a 404 file not found error showing in the iframe, but the system still continues to work.
An alternative that I tried is to put the easyphpcalendar output into a module postion in Joomla, using the Jumi module to encapsulate the script. There are serious disadvantages to this that you need to be aware of before you start.
Jumi is a 3rd party script that lets you put things into modules, it works well, BUT if the script fails your whole site will stop serving! Wow that’s not convenient. See the separate post on embedding easyphpcalendar into a joomla site with jumi module.
If you want to use easy php calendar on a Joomla site then there are two ways to go about it, either use a wrapper, or use the Jumi module. There’s another post here about wrappers, this one is about the Jumi module.
If you only want to show a month view of your calendar then it looks pretty silly as a small view in a wrapper, so you might want to put it into a module position within your Joomla template, that’s really much more convenient.
What I discovered is that it works, but if there is a problem the whole site goes down!
If the Jumi module fails with a php error such as file not found, it generates a php error and script execution ceases, which stops the whole site immediately. If it had been a script within an iframe, then the main site would have continued running and the iframe alone would have shown an error message. So, keep that in mind when deciding whether or not to use Jumi.
For once I’ve made real progress - I have successfully applied the Joomla override mechanism to all three types of ‘things’
What a difference that made to the visual appearance!
We used to say . . .
You can’t win ‘em all - but it would be nice to win once in a while!
That’s just how I feel about working with Joomla. It would be nice if there was just a little documentation somewhere that was clear, well-written, easy to follow and helped me to achieve the results that I feel Joomla can produce.
Instead it’s a constant battle, searching the web, scouring out-of-the-way forums and trying to make sense of half-documented ramblings.
Yes, it’s some time since I posted anything here. Apart from a vacation in Portugal and a couple of trips to the UK it’s been solid Joomla study and use.
It’s paid off well, I can see myself abandoning Wordpress as I become more proficient with Joomla. It all comes down to flexibility and the ability to do things. Wordpress is a weblog and a very good one, IMHO the best, but, Joomla is broader and can be applied to more situations.
As soon as I have spare time I am going to convert this experiences weblog to Joomla, in fact the whole of my newtojoomla website might just become a Joomla site.
I found these problems with Joomla . . .
Don’t let any of these things stop you from doing your own evaluation of Joomla, it’s an extremely powerful and effective way to develop sites, and once you get used to the administration interface and know you way around you might even find yourself being reluctant to go back to hand coding!
Here’s my view after trying set up sites in different ways.
As I see it there are two ways . . .
When you first start with Joomla you have no idea what things like sections and categories are, why they are useful and how they link together. After a couple of weeks I’m still wondering too, so don’t get discouraged. If you let the installer put in the test data you will have a fully-populated working site. Great you may think. But you would be wrong.
Wrong because you don’t know how it all hangs together and that’s because you didn’t build it yourself. That means you don’t know what the bits are and how they fit together.
Compare that with an ‘empty’ install of Joomla.
In this case there is nothing. I mean nothing there, when you visit your site all you will see is the heading and a title. That’s great.
Great because you will have to read the tutorial and start building from scratch. There’s nothing like reading the documentation and doing what you are told to make you remember and understand.
Just do it that way and you will understand and make real progress.
10 days passed, not all spent learning about and using Joomla, but lots of progress made.
I find it VERY frustrating that I know exactly how I want a page to look and link into other pages but I don’t know how to persuade Joomla to do it. Well, now at least I’m getting to know my way around Joomla enough to know how to do certain things.
I’m still confused by Sections and Categories, and getting the right look to pages, but it’s getting easier.
I can see light at the end of the tunnel.
I don’t know about other Joomla Newbie’s but I find the admin section very difficult to conceptualise.
I’ve been designing websites for ten years now, so my thinking is largely along the lines of containers within css, images, html and all the other stuff that goes to make up pages. Suddenly I’m presented with the totally different concept of user areas etc that Joomla uses.
I find it very difficult to know where these areas are and how to get my articles and images to go where I want them. I think in terms of page layouts - from my print and graphic design days, and I find that the Joomla documentation does not give me the handles I need to get hold of the way that things are done with Joomla.
Before you can complete the setup of Joomla you will need a database so that Joomla can store information about your website. You can choose different database management systems, but by far the most popular is mysql, and that’s the one on my server.
So . . . I set the mysql database up, taking screenshots along the way and put them together into a web page it’s here
Page two of the tutorial added so now it’s complete.