Day 16: Incubator – The Hard Way

October 30, 2009 · Posted in 90 Days of StomperNet, Diary: StomperNet Incubator

Ha ha ha! So Mambo and Joomla are more or less the same. And Weebly.com takes up to 48 hours to setup if you already have an existing domain with another host. confused The Thesis theme under Wordpress is not free and neither is Semiologic. Through a friend’s laptop, I got to play around with XSitePro. It has lots of Newbie-friendly themes but they don’t look very professional. XSitePro does have better looking themes but Newbie-friendliness goes downhill when you want to do customizations. I can see how XSitePro can be useful for creating those Squeeze Pages and sub websites quickly. But it does not look like it can give a good foundation for your main website.

I made it my goal to at least finalize which tool I will use to build my main website. I have decided to go for Joomla. All the tools I mentioned in the previous paragraph have disadvantages. The only disadvantage I see with Joomla is I don’t see a way to just visually drag and drop the page components you want to put on your webpage. In that aspect of Newbie-friendliness, I give WordPress the edge. But I chose to use Joomla over Wordpress because the Joomla free templates are more professional looking than the Wordpress free templates. You see, my biggest weakness in this do-it-yourself approach is I do not have the talent to draw. And if color coordination is a dance, I have only left feet. 3 of them in fact just to give you an idea how handicapped I am with this. Better looking themes mean less need for me to do customizations.

Joomla and Mambo are more or less the same. I learned that they were initially developed by one group. However at some point, a group of developers decided to branch out on their own. Thus came Joomla. When forced to choose between something very similar, I went for statistics. It was close though. Just slightly more people use Joomla than Mambo. More users mean a bigger community. So that difference no matter how small tipped my decision to go Joomla.

Joomla it is. With a pot of coffee acting as an hourglass of sorts. I buckled down to work. It got downright ugly quickly. If ever you find yourself in the same situation as I am in right now, don’t ever ever ever ever delete the Main Menu from the list of Menus. Or you will find yourself re-installing Joomla. This happened because I was trying to find out where everything was by removing stuff one by one.

The pot of coffee (my personal hourglass) is now empty. But I did complete finding out where everything was. I can even give a Newbie estimate on when I can get back to the lessons with my Incubator classmates – Monday, November 2, 2009.

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