Setup a new site in Joomla

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.

For once I’ve made real progress - I have successfully applied the Joomla override mechanism to all three types of ‘things’

• component output - by overriding the whole of the layout of the weblinks module so it looks more like a list of links than the default layout
  • removed the sequence number from the start of each line
  • removed the hit counter from the end of each line
  • removed the dropdown box that selects the number of links shown on the page
  • rearranged the line layout so that the link description and hyperlink are shown on one lin
• module output -
• css - by overriding the css associated with a commercial template (js_mytemplate from Joomlashack.com), to be exact
  • removing the 10px top margin on the page
  • removing the top border from the page
  • removed the newsflash module position from the header to make more space to the right of the site title
  • removed the -1px letter spacing from the site title (can’t you tell I have a design background)
  • removed the -1px letter spacing from the site slogan
  • put a background image into the header
  • moved the site title and slogan to the right to accommodate a logo

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.

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.