After selecting Joomla I figured I need to navigate the Joomla modules network to extend my site. At first when I started this website refresh, Joomla had a Joomla Forge. It was a bit confusing to navigate the variety of modules and their specific functions. Combine a confusing navigation with the fact that there was many dead projects listed and they all appeared active. One day I went to the joomla.org site one day and it said that they just opened the Joomla extensions. Joomla extensions has a really nice taxonomy to the variety of projects. They also put both user and editorial ratings against the projects. So now there is a nice navigation to the projects as well as a few ranking mechanisms. This helps navigate the large variety of projects as well helps to not let developers stumble around a dead project.
I needed a blog, newsletter, form engine, SEO, and some minor document management. All these types of modules are fairly standard in the open source php WCM’s. Please note that the comments in this set of blog entries comprises some of my experiences at the time I put this site together. So some of this content is already dated so the pharse “Your mileage may vary” is very true.
Blog:
I thought about using blogger as my blog and keep the blog disconnected from my main website but the blog is what will help attract and retain people on my site. Joomla comes with a limited set of blog features. So I surfed the extensions site. I knew that one developer maintained a port of WordPress as a Joomla module, so that would be my fall back. At the time there was only one other viable blog candidate, mamblog. Mamblog has most of the necessary blog features however the developers working on the project didn’t seem active. So I fell back to the default blog, http://www.joomladeveloping.org/ . The JD-WP module is a very good port or WordPress. WordPress is well developed php open source blog. So for now I use WordPress.
Newsletter:
The next module I looked into is a newsletter module. I actually kept the first one I test drove. Letterman is a nice module and component to allow for the users to subscribe and unsubscribe. With comments like “It’s ridiculous easy to use! by rfs1970” why look further. Letterman has a backend component that gives me a form to type the news letter into. I really didn’t look too much more because Letterman was simple and fulfilled my simple requirements. One thing that would make Letterman nicer is to allow the newsletters to be managed as a normal piece of content in the Joomla repo instead of being managed in it’s own db tables.
Form:
The forms part of my site currently is the contact us form. However, in the future I would like the ability to capture more data for maybe surveys or other possible data collection needs. I want a forms engine that allows me to configure a simple and complicated multi page forms. I also want the product to manage the data that it collects, including the persistance of the data. There are several popular form modules in Joomla, MOSForms, perForms, Phil-A-Form, and Facile forms are the few I worked with. Right off the bat I could eliminate two, MOSForms, at the time, did not install properly. There was an issue with creating the database. Phil-A-Form is not free so on to perForms. perForms is a very simple and easy to use form module. perForms allows developers to configure forms and map the form to database tables. The product actually creates the database for you. perForms allows me to create the contact us form but does not handle muli page form processing. Facile Forms at first blush seemed not to work but it installed with a lot of features displayed. As I dug into the module I noticed that it was built to process some fairly complicated forms. It was actually so difficult that I decided to use perForms because it is very simple. If I every have the requirement of more complicated form processing I will use Facile Forms.
Document Management:
I need the ability to upload and mange some binary files. The files won’t all be M$ Office files but also code snippets, zip’s, pdf’s, and others. I would like a module that allows me to upload and track the usage of soft files. There were two modules Docman and some eXplorer module. Unfortunately the eXplorer module was dead. So I installed Docman. Docman allows me to upload my documents and then link to them through a Docman specific URL. The product also reports the clicks on the documents. High and site, the reporting of clicks in Docman is not useful data. The product is a bit complicated because you need to first upload the document then, through a different admin page, you need to make the uploaded document a File. Once it’s a file and published then you can link to the documents.
I will write about my SEO experiences in the next post.
