Setup a new site in Joomla

What a learning experience!

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

• put the calendar into a wrapper
• use Jumi to integrate easyphpcalendar into your Joomla website

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!

Why?

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.

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.

What are the problems using Joomla

I found these problems with Joomla . . .

• The documentation is limited, which means that understanding the terminology is difficult
• Additional skills are needed to customize a Joomla installation
  • you may need to purchase templates
  • to make your own template a high-level of php and css skill is needed
  • support  for purchased templates can be limited when you want to customize them
  • development work has taken longer than I expected
  • serving of pages can be significantly slower than ‘hand coded’ pages

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!

Using Wordpress doesn’t seem the right way to be going about this, but I’m familiar with WP, so I can start passing on my experiences of Joomla immediately - as soon as I know enough about Joomla to set up my weblog using it I’ll move over