Joomla: The Continuing Saga
On the one hand, I learned about something called Lorem
Ipsum. It is filler text created from a
scrambled section of one of Cicero’s philosophical writings. On the other hand, Joomla also had me
scrambled for hours at a time as I tried to adjust pictures so that they looked…
just… right… and very often they did not.
After signing up for Joomla’s demo, I watched the tutorial
videos and followed along. I tried
downloading extensions and when that did not work, I borrowed a laptop and
worked on my Joomla site from there, while watching the tutorials from my
computer. I downloaded the JCE and
Akeeba extensions and tried JEvents and a newsletter extension, but did not end
up using either of those. I did
successfully add events and teasers that showed pictures. I also added a cool looking Search bar like
the ones on real websites.
While wrestling with extensions and picture placement, I also
finally came up with a theme for my website.
With my newfound appreciation for dummy text, I decided to embrace the
chaos and dedicate my site to garbled Latin, meta books, and long dead guest
authors, creating the Lorem Ipsum Library.
After a while, I started to catch on to the pattern of
things on the Joomla Administrator site.
Once the major features were installed and the categories set up,
editing and fixing things seemed to be a little more intuitive. There were so many options and steps and
pages and… stuff. As I continued to
create new things to put on the website, I grew paranoid that I would forget to
go back and edit something. (Like that
newsletter option.) Keeping the site
simple and straightforward worked best for me.
My biggest problem, as seen in the picture at the top of the
page, was a box of text going too far to the right. Crazily enough, this was what plagued me for
the majority of the time I worked on the site.
I just could not get the picture and the text to stay in the white
box. After using my best resources – my
awesome classmates – I must have clicked something right, because the text
lined right up. Somehow.
What helped most (even beyond the tutorials) was keeping
logged into my Twitter account and checking the class discussion boards every
so often. I got around a lot of problems
by asking classmates or reading what someone else had asked. While the tutorial videos did a good job of
taking me step-by-step through how to set up a website, I did not dare wander
off the beaten path and try to add, say, a newsletter mailing list, because the
videos did not explain all the steps.
Maybe with more time, I would have figured it out, but that just was not
possible with this assignment.
The source of most of my website’s text? Lorem Ipsum Generator: http://www.procato.com/lipsum/
