Oh, Joomla

Well, Joomla was certainly an experience.

To give some background, Joomla is a content management system (CMS) that allows you to create your own websites without extensive web knowledge or background. Joomla is also open source, which allows for a myriad of functionality that is open to all for experimentation and development. Another nice aspect of Joomla is the rather large community of online forums and videos for help and trouble shooting (which I relied heavily).

Now, on to the building of my website.

The Beginning  

 

Within minutes of my first attempt at using Joomla -- I hit a snag. For some reason (one that I still haven't been able to diagnose), I could not connect to the Joomla server to download extensions from the web. Luckily, this feature was not the only way to install the ever important Joomla extensions. Through the forum message boards, I saw you could also procure extension file packages straight from the Joomla web directory and upload the zip file manually. Thankfully, this worked and I was able to more forward with the creation of my site (thanks again to the #mlis7505 twitter crew for suggestions and support!)

As far as content for this website, I settled on fantasy baseball since, outside of my MLIS studies, it most likely leads consumption of my free time.

Features 

 

I think the most interesting and most difficult feature I added was the image slideshow on my homepage. I needed to install the extension for Responsive CSS3 Slideshow. From there, it offered a module that allowed for the creation of the slideshow. However, I needed to find and crop images that would work within the slideshow parameters. I went with 880 x 220 pixels which seemed to work fine. Overall, I liked the look and feel of the slideshow and think it added a different dimension to my site.

Moreover, I felt my change to the Google font "Lora" was aesthetically appealing. While not much different from the default font, I think this change offered subtle shift in font had a decent impact on the overall look and feel of the site.

Additionally, I created 4 menus (one of which linked to a category), a search box, a contact form, and embedded a Youtube video.

Thoughts  

 

Overall, Joomla was not terribly difficult to use. It was certainly more involved than simply managing a Wordpress blog, however. But with that increased involvement comes greater flexibility, usability, and creativity. I would love to devote a little more time to the use of Joomla. I am sure that with more than simply a week's time, one could really become proficient and be able to use some of the more attractive and powerful aspects of the CMS. Although, it is a testament to the overall ease of use that so many of us could make decently attractive websites in such a short amount of time.

Also, I felt a certain déjà vu as I used Joomla to when I used the website building site Angelfire as a kid. The whole uploading content to a webshell experience just felt familiar. As one might expect, the Joomla experience is eons past that simple Angelfire website creator, but it was reassuring to feel that this whole endeavor wasn't completely foreign.