A while back I posted something about how Joomla is a great platform for not only blogging, but developing a website that does more than just a traditional blog.

Now that Joomla 1.5 is out , I've been considering how to go about relating my observations and impressions about it and I think picking up the thread on blogging w/Joomla is the way to go...

One thing you'll notice when you fire up Joomla 1.5 and jump into the content editing interface is that everything looks cleaner - gone are the comically large diskette, checkmark and red 'x' of yesteryear; moving around and getting things done happens more easily and quickly in 1.5 - two key components of blogging.

If you are reading this and currently maintain a blog using say, Wordpress, you'll understand when I say that uploading images, categorizing content and so on is cumbersome - confounded further by the fact that the editing interface is seperate from your nice templated front end.  Personally, I think that if the people publishing on a blog are offered the same interface as their readers, there's a higher chance their communication will be clearer (sort of like how a dinner party is always more fun when the host has an open kitchen and can talk to their guests whilst cooking... well, I'm not that great at the subtle art of metaphor but methinks you probably get it :) ).

Asides from more easily posting to a website, Joomla 1.5 has gotten better and letting you work solely in the front end.  Seen in the screenshot above, now you can choose both the section and category to place your content in front the front end interface.... That's pretty snazzy - and means that you can move posts around your site if need be.

In my next post on blogging with Joomla I'll get technical and walk you through the basics of how to blog well with Joomla - things like how you setup your content sections/categories can really affect both the administration of your blog and its navigability - plus, I'll review some new features in Joomla 1.5 like its improved media handling and interface. 

For a long long time I've been sending out email newsletters - for both personal projects as well as clients.  A few years back it became worth spending the time to code elegant html-formatted newsletters because most people had formatted-email reading ability offered through gmail/hotmail/etc or their local email client applications.

There are tons of issues to concern yourself with when considering how to send an html newsletter via email and the biggest issue I've found is that when using 3rd party senders like Groundspring , the sent from and reply to addresses are usually different - especially when you have email click-through stats enabled (so that the clicks can be traced through the 3rd party sending domain).

Well, I just noticed that sometime in the past year Campaign Monitor has solved this riddle by adding SMTP authentication - so you can use your own domain to send email through! Nice... 

Incase you're not subscribed to the Joomlasphere newsletter, you can peep a copy online at this link:

http://www.joomlasphere.net/mailers/102507.html

Visit Joomlasphere.net to subscribe! :) 

In dealing with various clients over the past few years, I constantly find myself dealing with hosting packages that just don't work.  Rather, they take far too much effort to get to work! 

At base, Joomla's pretty simple to get up and running; it just requires three prime things - Register Globals and Safe Mode should be OFF and Magic Quotes should be ON.  Now, most of you out there likely signed up with a web host because of cheap prices - back when perhaps you just needed a domain and some email address, maybe a couple of static HTML pages as well.  That cheap host might offer these settings to help you run a Joomla site but that's just not enough.

The beauty of a CMS or Online Application Toolkit like Joomla or Drupal lies in the functional scalability they offer - you'll want to be able to grow your site in time but your hosting package could seriously cause headaches at those growth stages, requiring more effort than is necessary.  Its really worth shopping around for a host that will be there to support you along the growth path your site takes in the future.

Things I suggest looking out for:

• The ability to maintain your own php.ini (so you can set your own maximum file size for uploads, amongst other things),
• A package that scales in hard disk *and* other system resources with time,
• Shell access & ftp access to your server,
  
• Previous experience hosting Joomla and other Open Source php/mysql CMS' - ask the host to give you a few URLs to sites they host

The learning curve for Joomla is still steeper than it should be - especially since a lot of documentation for Joomla 1.5 is still being written.  Also, a lot of great knowledge - in fact, what I deem to be the *best* stuff to read in order to learn how to best use this great CMS, is on the forums... which means that if your eyes bug-out from staring at a screen too much you might have to settle for the printed word.

I just got news of a little site which lists some books about Joomla in one place, with links to buy em on Amazon.  Of course, you could simply pop over to amazon.com and search for Joomla but hey, whatever floats your boat.  Worth a peek: http://www.joomlabooks.net/

Quick rant time - we're putting together a fairly large site in Drupal 5.x at the moment which has a bunch of menus. 

Most Open Source CMS' (incl both Drupal and Joomla) allow you to setup blog and list displays of content - which really aide in keeping the number of menu items down, but sometimes an aesthetic will require you to build out many menus - which can be confusing and time-taking to manage.

This is a prime situation which exemplifies simple but important differences between CMS' - Joomla's menu management system is a bit quirky because of ItemIDs and theme association but its waaaaay simpler to manage menu items in Joomla than Drupal because of the listed-view approach on the admin side, which allows you to select multiple items, delete them or move them to another menu in a bunch and assign access permissions - all things that Drupal's stock menu module don't afford.

Again - simple but so important!  Okay, I'm off to delete 30-odd menu items individually on this Drupal site now :( ... 

I haven't blogged about it but there's a really good official resource available over @ http://help.joomla.org - an official User Manual for Joomla 

After leafing through Compass Designs' recently released 'Joomla Admin Manual ' I got thinking - why is there a need for a third party general useage manual for Joomla?  Well, after comparing the two just now, I doubt there is any reason and would rather see more in-depth guides to building particular types of sites etc.

The official manual which was released for Joomla 1.0.11 will hold its own until J!1.5 is released and offers a wealth of information for both Joomla! newbies as well as developers wishing to give their clients something to fall back on for site support as well as further information.  Its about 60 pages longer than Compass' $27 book and is free under the Creative Commons Share Alike 2.5 license .

Content-wise, the two manuals are similar - though the official one has some useful details - including an explanation of icons found throughout the front and back end of a Joomla site, and features a glossary plus sitemap of the Joomla back-end.  Compass' eBook on the other hand has some tidbits on SEO and introduces a few 3rd party extensions that could really assist newbies. 

It was announced today that the official documentation teams are switching up a bit - with Chris Davenport taking over assisted by Ian MacLennan and Andy Wallace; expect some killer doc support for 1.5 when its released....

In short - read the 1.0.11 manual and if you've got an extra few bucks and hankering to learn more - download Compass' 'Joomla Admin Manual' as well. 

Okay, so this doesn't have anything to do with Joomla, but I thought someone might enjoy Youtube 's sense of humor - very 1996 wired-before-it-was-bought style, if you ask me; snapped when youtube.com was offline just now:

Something we've ben pretty stubborn about @ designguru is developing CMS-based sites from scratch in a hosted environment.  The logic was simple: we not only want to get an accurate picture of how the sites will perform on their eventual hosting platform, but develop our perception of the sites we build as independent entities.

Recently, I've discovered something which challenged this approach to building Joomla sites and won: its called XAMPP and is quite simply fantastic!

XAMPP is a combined distribution of Apache server, MySQL, PHP, Perl which comes in 4 flavours: Linux, Windows, OS X and even Solaris!  With one simple install you now have a complete hosting solution thats robust enough to whip up advanced Joomla sites right there @ the beach on your macbook! :)

No matter how dedicated to Joomla you are, I bet you're constantly peeking at other Open Source CMS' to see what else is going on out there and pick up tips and inspiration for your own projects.

I mentioned Drupal a couple of posts ago as an alternative CMS to Joomla - it has its own strengths that make it an option for certain projects we develop @ designguru , yet it also has setbacks which make Joomla a more favourable option.

Asides from visiting drupal.org - the official project site, its worth checking out this little chart I found via JoomlaFeed comparing the two over on Alledia's blog ...