Joomla Reflection

I was happy to hear we'd be working with Joomla for this class, because it's the CMS I know the best. I've dabbled with Drupal and Wordpress, but Joomla is the system I have experience in building websites. After signing up with Cloudacess, I started by deleting or un-publishing all of the sample menus and articles to clear the clutter. I like to make a site menu first so I can determine how the articles will work together. This seems a little backwards in Joomla, but I make a placeholder article and use it for every menu entry. Once I have the menu in place, I determine how many categories I need. I create my categories and then start writing my articles and assigning them to the correct categories. I edit the menu entries as I finish each article to add the real articles instead of the placeholders.

In the case of the home page, I wanted that to work as a blog. Instead of assigning an article to the menu, I changed the menu item type to "category blog" and assigned it to a category I created called "homepage blog." I made three articles in the "homepage blog" category to test the blog.

Once I had the menu and articles the way I wanted them, I started editing the template. I choose to stick with the default template, but I altered the color scheme. I checked to see what CSS class each element was assigned to using the Firebug add-on to Mozilla Firefox. I simply right-clicked on the elements I wanted to change and viewed them with Firebug. Once I knew their classes, I edited the CSS for the template. I made a new header image with a combination of creative commons and Microsoft clip-art. I also downloaded a free font that looked appropriate to the subject matter. I uploaded the header image using the Media Manager and changed the header pathway in the template CSS file.

I didn't do a lot of stylistic changes, but I'm happy with how quickly I created the site. Compared with when I started learning Joomla over a year ago, this exercise made me realize how far I've come.