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Leading on from the about section.... After several people recommended that I create my own website, I decided to take their advice and see what I could come up with. One friend recommended that I create a website based upon the small amount of web design that I've done. While someone else suggested that I create my own blog to share my often unique and perhaps often annoying ideas with everyone else.
More background: I'm not a fan of blogging or the rabid followers of the religion that is Blogianity. So I'm aiming for a website that transcends Blogianity by providing articles or commentary from unique perspectives sans net drama and sans youtube style comments / insult trading. So I hope to provide an all-in-one site for all of my ideas and creative efforts, plus input from other people. After debating what to do with myself I came to the question of 'How?' I already made a good contact in a UK based hosting company (5quidhost.co.uk), so that was the first place to turn to after I bought the esoteriic.com domain name. The owner of 5quid hosting is a big promoter of Joomla hence I decided to check out more of this content management system (CMS). One of the main reasons for wanting to have a CMS is that it allows an author to log in to a website and submit articles to that website in text format. The text input is converted to html automatically and saves an editor having to mess around with html by hand. Of course, CMS's allow more than that but anyhow.... A few years ago (3?), I was involved in helping a friend do some web design and we considered writing our own CMS from scratch using some combination of php/ perl/ cgi/ python. We found a proficient php coder and went down that route for a while. Fortunately things like Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress saves anyone from all the hard coding and excessive finger work. Setting out to use Joomla: Once I had set up my hosting account I set about installing Joomla on website. This is easy enough to do as most hosting companies have Fantastico which provides automatic installation of a whole bunch of things like forums and Joomla. When I started down this path I went to find out what Jooma is about and how to use it, I found good videos for newbies here: http://help.joomla.org/ghop/feb2008/task167/index.html After that it is merely a case of figuring out of how to use Joomla to provide everything that I want: a blog style hub of articles with the ability for people to talk about the articles.The first part is easy. Joomla provides the ability to have several authors publish articles to one website, you don't need coding experience to be an author but coding experience helps if you are a site admin. The latter part (commenting on articles/blog posts) is slightly trickier. Joomla doesn't provide the ability to comment on blog posts in the standard build (out of the box). After a quick google search I found the following comment component: http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/contacts-&-feedback/articles-comments The file is a .zip but fortunately Joomla can upload the zip file from your computer and install it automatically. No fuss. In summation: Power/customisability of Joomla is good but you will need to install a separate comment component in order to make any Joomla blogging worthwhile.
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