Well, just when you think you have decided on the content management system that is right for you…something else pops up. After having a talking with Ken as he expressed interest in installing Mambo, I wanted to make sure he was aware of the recent turmoil with Mambo, and pointed him to the “new” CMS the once Mambo developers decided to create: Joomla. After looking at it (version 1.0.0 came out Sept 15, 2005), I am interested in seeing what is capable of. The deleopers seem very professional, committed, and knowledgable. I look forward to seeing great things from this CMS and Ken (hopefully at pesanka.com). Once I get some free time, I will play with it. I have a few other pressing projects right now that need all my attention ;).

After a weekend packed of long hours working on getting everything just right…I am 99% complete. Now it is time to get picky with CSS as well as use Apache’s mod_rewrite to clean up some of the nasty URLs XOOPS creates. Tomorrow…the link.

After completely moving towards tabless designs, it is hard to look at the cluttered code of tables in code. I have probably put in 15 hours of playing with XOOPs now, a few of these hours stripping code down to be more CSS driven. I am all about clean code these days, but boy do I have my work cut outr for me. I am having problems giving up complete control with layout with a lot of what I am working on, but I have to stay focused on the prize: added functionality without a lot of effort. Last night I upgraded my install to XOOPs 2.2 from 2.13. The upgrade was painless, but some of the modules I want to use are not compatible with the new version. I will wait. Ideally I would some day produce my own CMS, and this idea is why I have been looking at several CMS packages. I would like to take the best from what I have worked with and put it all together. I am at least a year away from doing this, but it is something I am looking towards. … [more]

Well, here I am again, looking at different CMSes for a few projects I have up my sleeve and I decided to compare XOOPS and Mambo. Why those two? I have a few friends that used both and liked them for one reason or another. I decided to download XOOPS after doing a comparison at CMS Matrix and played with it last night until midnight. I have to say, now that I have a better understanding of CMSes in general after playing with Plone and hacking WordPress, I am pretty impressed. More in a bit.

For years I have been searching for a web site solution that would fit my needs:

easy to change and edit content (via any web browser)
integrated blog
integrated search
easy to maintain
database driven
templates
able to adapt to mobile technologies

I have played with many CMSes over the years, and I finally realized the power of Plone, but your average hosting company does not offer plone hosting. None of the other CMSes really appealed to me because I had to do so many customizations, and I really don’t have any membership needs, so I decided to look elsewhere for a solution. In my mind I had two options: home made CMS or to do something with my beloved WordPress install. I decided to follow Alex King and to use WordPress to drive my entire web site. I have used a number of plugins, mod_rewrite rules, and some customizations to make it all possible, but so far I am very happy with how everything turned out. I have made several changes so far to multiple pages via my web browser, I looked at my blog via my phone on the train this morning, and am … [more]

I have been really busy the past few days, too busy to blog? Probably not…but I have been really focused on a few projects to learn new technology. My biggest project at has been getting plone customized. I knew it was time to get serious with some solid CMS solution, and plone was the best fit. Learning how everything works has been interesting and I am finally pretty comfortable with the ZMI (Zope Management Interface) and am starting to feel better about DTML (Document Template Markup Language). If you are interested in playing with Plone, there are free hosting services that will allow you to build and customize plone sites.

After reading a few messages from my php mailing list, I again stopped to think about a content management system. Plone is amazing, but unless you have access to your own server, or have a host that supports Zope/Plone, you need something else to work with. I was intrigued by XOOPS until I went to my CMS info site. Not too much good stuff to say. I was excited that it was object oriented and that it used Smarty, but looks like I will keep looking, or perhaps make my own one of these days. Stay tuned.