The Plumber’s House

This post is just one in a few posts about my experience of putting this website together while utilizing all Open Source Software (OSS). Just some background: I host my site on Lunarpage servers. They run me about 8 bucks a month for a plan that I’ll never hit the maximums (both bandwidth and disk usage). I’ve run my domain on their equipment for ~4 years and they have been very stable, reasonable, and have good phone and online support. My only issue is that they don’t have shell access but for the few times I need it I just send support an email with the command in the email and they execute it for me, of course after an odd customer confirmation scenario. My last website was a simple blog and I used Movabletype 2.something it’s still up here. I think because of a few articles I wrote and a few groups that I am active in I was able to obtain some modest google page ranks. I didn’t post much on the blog as I always worried about my entries not being perfect. However, I think I got a handle on that now.

So, I started to think about what the next version of my site and for that matter the way I would portray my business was going to be. The first thing I thought is that I should not build the plumber’s house again but maybe try and practice some of what I preach. So I started where I always recommend starting and looked at my existing content. Seeing how my old content was sparse and not really focused in the direction I was going to take my business I decided to start with fresh. So, when you start a website project from scratch you should start with the process of creating content. I think started to evaluate the typical IT Consulting services and offerings, networked with my business relationships, and created content and for that matter a strategy for the business. After assembling my content I figured its time to start to look to acquire a website content management system (WCM). My hosting provider has php and perl installed and I have a software budget of zero. I figured I’d look for the easiest simplest WCM to allow me to do some customization when I want. Luckily, CMS acquisition is something that I do in my business on a regular basis. Also, I’m always watching and experimenting with Open Source Software (OSS) WCM’s to see what innovation is happening in the WCM market.

I ended up selecting Joomla for a few reasons.

1. The site itself wasn’t going to have a lot of content. In my opinion if you have a hundered plus pieces of content then Joomla is a little difficult to manage all that content.
2. Joomla has a strong developer’s network. Additionally, I like the recent split in code base from Mambo and the fresh ideas that the Joomla core development team says they’ll bring to the next version.
3. It is written in PHP and has a very simple way of developing its modules. So in the future I can build my own modules if I want to bring more functionality to my web site, i.e. Project Management utilities.
4. Very good blog application (WordPress) has been ported into a Joomla Module.

Next post we’ll go through my experience of learning more about Joomla and navigating through the 3rd party modules.