Diving In With Joomla

January 29th, 2006

Starting to muck about with Joomla, an open source CMS that I’m planning to use for my bottle cap collection, which is getting far too large for me to handle in the old, manual way. So far I’ve noticed the basic concept is similar to WordPress as there are CSS templates wrapping around information stored in a database, and it also uses PHP. But Joomla seems to have much more robust admin tools, modules, and graphic support to make all the parts of a web page look prettier.

Having come to this set up from the coding by hand days, I must say it’s a bit scary to be so removed from the design of the content. The only analogy I can think of is cooking. There are times you want to make everything from scratch, others when you want to eat out and have someone else do everything, but most often we’re somewhere in the middle, following a recipe and using a couple of ingredients that have 90% of the work done.

So at this point, after a few hours of mucking around I’ve got something together that’s a great framework. I’ll be adding more items little by little. My uber-goal is to generate a grid of sorts with thumbnails for as many bottle caps as I can cram onto one page.