I’ve been a little quiet on the blogging front this week due to playing “catch-up” with the NCSC web site. I’ve been volunteering with the design and maintenance of this site for the last 3 years, and now the web site is in need of a face-lift: both on the front end and the back end. Frankly, as I’ve gotten busier I’ve become quite the bottleneck in keeping the NCSC web content fresh, and I’d like to eliminate that by using a CMS system. I played with Drupal for a bit, but ended up going Joomla, the sexiest free solution out there.
I’ve done a little bit of work with Joomla in the past, using it primarily for the NCSC Resource Bank, however it’s been quite a learning curve trying to get this to work. Over the past week I’ve had a really hard time wrapping my head around the Joomla content management methodology. I’ve spent hours reading and playing with the damn thing, and scratch my head so much that it’s become sore.
Then right as I’m about to give up, the light bulb goes off above my head and it’s become clear to me. The trouble is that this has happened a half-dozen times as I’ve been implementing the site, and I’ve lost a lot of time (it doesn’t help that I procrastinated on this as well). This isn’t the first time I’ve said “If I don’t get this in the next hour I’m going back to a static site.” Then it becomes clear and I move on.
Joomla is a really slick tool, and you can’t beat the price and community support. However, as technical as I am – if I’m having trouble figuring this out, how can I expect someone who’s not technical to wrap their brains around this. I’ll cross that bridge as I come to it.
I was hoping to expand on my Joomla experience, but it’s late in the evening. I’ll follow up more tomorrow and hopefully offer a sneak peak of the web site soon.