Setup a new site in Joomla

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.

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.

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!