Joomla!

[ComicChick]

Ok, so I was lookin at fonts and junk, and decided to look for layouts and whatnot. I got designated to work on our family genealogy project, and guess who gets to do the website too?


any ways, I came across one I really liked, and as i was reading the blog about it, it started talking about joomla and some stuff that was over my head. apparently it's an open source program, but all i know is that it means it's free right?

can someone inform me on what Joomla is and how it works? I was hoping someone here was familiar with it before i blindly download it.

 

[bgates87]

Well I've never used Joomla! before but I've developed web sites before. I went to the Joomla! website and started reading about it and from what I can tell it is not something that a complete beginner to Web Development will be able to pick up quickly.

Looking at the technical requirements, your computer basically needs to be a web server in order to run the program. There's not a simple .exe file you click on to start building your website, the program is written in PHP so you need to have PHP installed to run it (if you don't know if you have PHP installed, you probably don't). You'll also need to install MySQL, Apache, and Microsoft IIS.

Joomla looks like a pretty useful program, but if you're completely new to website design and don't have to the time to learn a lot about web development then this program is probably not for you. You will want to find a more simple WYSIWYG web editor that will just output all of the files related to your website directly to your computer. From there you will need to find a host, get a domain name and upload your files.

When it comes to finding a host, if this is a web page that will mainly be viewed by members of your family (averaging 2 or 3 visits a day?) then you may want to look at some free web hosting options on the internet. They typically don't allow for a lot of wiggle room but if this is a small website that won't get much traffic it could be a great (free) solution.

As far as web editors go, the only one I've ever used is Dreamweaver. It has a pretty nice interface with drag-and-drop functionality, although I'm not that familiar with it because I usually just wrote the code by hand. It's not free though (unless you download a trial, which would probably have limited capabilities), but here is one good free web editor I found while searching the internet, it's called KomPozer:

http://www.kompozer.net/download.php

I downloaded and played around with it some and the user interface seems pretty straight-forward. Of course if you don't like it you can look for some other ones, I assume you are familiar with Google. Or if you want you can still try Joomla!, you can probably figure out how to use it and install everything you need, I'm just trying to suggest some faster and easier options.

Whatever you decide, good luck! By the way, I love the new line art over in the coloring thread!

 

[ComicChick]

thanks for the info. i'm know basic html and stuff but nowhere near enough to where i'm ready to tamper with Joomla yet.

i've heard of kompzer and I will try it out. As for Dreamweaver, i've heard of that too, but i don't know anyone who has the program.

I used to have Adobe GoLive on my desktop, but I didn't realize what it was until it was too late. It basically sat on my computer for who knows how long when i could've been utilizing it.
sadly, it was lost in a reformat so unless i can find the serial number somewhere in my stuff, and possibly redownload it, i think that's a lost cause.

i have a domain name and host (godaddy), but what you were saying about traffic and what not made a lot of sense. when it comes times for renewwal, i think i'll just keep the web address and drop the web space and stuff. i can always redirect, right?

can anyone recommend a good, free web host?