In December 2005, I made the move from a system of static webpages that worked
well for my way of thinking but didn't captivate the reader or encourage
browsing of my site, to a PHP-based content managed site running Joomla.  A
month later I've uploaded 50 articles and the site is registering hundreds of
hits a day.  Overall I'm impressed with the software, the things it's enabled
me to do with my content, and the power of this platform.  The following are a
few thoughts about Joomla in general.  The Install Process I wrote about the
installation and upgrade process earlier and maintain that page up to date as I
upgrade the site. In essence, it was a rather painless install process, thanks
to my ISP, which made the Fantastico Cpanel script installer available for my
use.  Fantastico made it simple.


Why Joomla in the First Place?  I looked around quite a bit when I wanted to
upgrade my site to dynamic, not static pages.  And the first thing I decided
was that the traditional blog interface wasn't for me.  I write about too many
different kinds of subject matter and need to be able to separate them, I hate
the calendar approach to most blog archives and wanted a clean search interface
for users interested in specific topics.  I took a look at Mambo, but when I
realized the open source developers that had created Mambo had evacuated the
premises and opened shop as Joomla, it was clear where the rapid-paced
development and improvement was going to be occurring.  I also discarded the
bulletin-board type interfaces like PHPBB, which are good but didn't suit the
purposes of a content-generator like me, and products like Drupal, which are
better equipped for other purposes in my opinion (though several excellent
sites have chose Drupal to manage content).

I am still evaluating Joomla, trying to figure out how to best integrate the
dynamic site with other content I had generated in static pages, and am still
experimenting with things like wrappers, hard links, and simply redoing the
site.  Perhaps if I were a more competent PHP programmer I'd have been able to
whip up something of my own design, but for now I'm stuck installing and
modifying other people's products.  Joomla, in my opinion, is the product that
best enables me to create what I want -- dynamic content, RSS feeds, an easy
search mechanism, meta data, hard links, links to static content, and more.
The components that don't suit or interest me -- site log ins, polls, web link
categories, and "picture of the day" content -- I simply disable.

Things I Like Total control over the home page -- what goes up and in what
order.  I can even repost old articles if I like.  I've done this for tech
articles I've updated.  The ability to enter an article but set it to be posted
at some future date.  This is great for press releases and so on.  I typically
write up the article when it's on my mind and post-date it so that it is
published at an appropriate moment.

Things I'd Like to See in a Future Version Statistics on what search engine
text is being input that leads to my site, i.e., "are people coming to my
Kubuntu page because they're searching on Ubuntu and Java" or what?  An
element in the images dialogue that allows me to deal with image widths.  I use
many images that are too wide for the article's column width and hot link them
to the full size image.  Doing so precludes my being able to use the MOSIMAGE
tag.  Instead, I use the full HTML markup for the image, which is easy for me,
but less convenient than being able to deal with this issue directly in the
otherwise-useful images dialogue.  Multiple image upload in the Media Manager.
I get around this one by simply uploading my files directly with an FTP client,
but if there were a way to batch upload files from the Media Manager -- even if
were a hack like selecting a folder instead of a file -- that would speed
things up for me.  Multiple Category Listings: This is a huge issue for the
kind of themes my writing encompasses.  I love Linux and work frequently with
Nicaragua, so when it's time to write about how I helped bring Linux to
Nicaragua back in 2001, how do I file it?  Both audiences that read my work
would be interested in the article, but for different reasons.  There is only
one system I know of that allows cross-filing and it is WordPress, but that
software insists on a blog-type interface (archives by calendar date, for
example) that didn't suit me.  I understand the fundamental design limitation
that database-driven sites face, and rumor has it that this feature is
scheduled for a medium-term upgrade to the Joomla software system.  But for me,
the sooner, the better.  In the meantime I make do with extensive use of
metatags and the Related Content menu.  It was exactly this kind of
categorization question with my own personal files that drove me to Mac OS X,
whose mind-blowingly-cool Spotlight technology took the pain out of deciding
whether my article about Writing Opportunities at SAIS should go under WebPages
or Writing or SAIS (for example).  I hope Joomla follows suit.