Despite being categorized in 'hacks,' this post is more about how to step outside the Joomla bubble and objectively re-think 'content.'

Ultimately, designguru's been working with Drupal quite a bit in the past few months and we love it for this cool thing called the CCK - its a means for making custom content... so you could effectively change the make-up of all blog posts on Drupal site and add in fields for, say, your mood when posting to your blog... of course, the ability to customize content types is super-liberating because you can really add personality to your site and creatively liberate it from stock-CMS prudishness....

Bring it back to Joomla with an example; I have say; I DESPISE pretty all options for event listings... I would *love* to just use 'content' - you know, post a regular article with a date field for the event, one more for its expiry and then create some type of list view to display all events - sorted by chronology...  With Drupal, this is simple... Joomla poses another problem because as-is, all content is comprised of the same 'intro' and 'main' fields, with standard publishing info and so on.  You'll need to use modules such as the brilliant 'display news module' to create a view, but then are limited to either embedding the module to an article and linking to that article through nav or simply positioning your module somewhere in a template-defined position. 

I've realized that it may seem complicated to tease application-functionality out Joomla, but its not necessarily impossible.  Things like dynamic event listings or displaying particular topical news in different areas of a site etc... can be achieved fairly simply if you really reflect on the relationship between these things:

1. content organization (section>category)
2. your navigation (in lieu of the difference between menus and dynamic list displays)
3.  the information you need from content.

On the last point; its easy to waft on when you can edit content in a wysiwyg editor that feels like MS Word, but there's a lot of power in Joomla's innate blog displays; try to keep the display of content on your site as dynamic as possible and consider things like the rising above the organisation of your content, to think about different types of content.

This may have seemed really wafty and un-directed... if anyone's still reading this blog, please do offer your thoughts on how Joomla handles content and how you've approached its limitations creatively... 

Comments (4) >>

Hi Qasim!
written by Amy Stephen, July 12, 2007

Nice thoughts, appreciate reading it. Have you looked at v 1.5 very much? I recommend Joe LeBlanc's book Learning Joomla! 1.5 Extension Development. I'd be curious what you thought of extensibility with the new release. They are nearing RC. Beta 2 is really looking good.

Oops!
written by Amy Stephen, July 12, 2007

Sorry about that! Learning Joomla! 1.5 Extension Development. (If you want to fix that link and delete this one, that would be *swell*!)

Good call...
written by designguru, July 12, 2007

Thanks for the heads-up Amy! I just bought a PDF download of the book and can't wait to pour through it in the next few days... I'll post a review here on the blog soon! q./

Hi Quasim
written by XTraze, September 26, 2007

First of all,
"Assalamo' alaikum"
And Congratz.
Just searched for "Joomla Blogs" on Google and got this on the first page. As for the matter with Joomla Content management. My opinion is that it's brilliant and the only downslide is that the inability to make sub-categories (cats in cats).
Which makes us go for Extensions.
Hope this will be K in the 1.5.

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