My First Joomla Site
Well, it’s been an interesting last couple of weeks — while in the midst of a full-on conference frenzy, I’ve also been designing, building and (finally) launching a brand-new advocacy site, the first I’ve tried to build using the Joomla content management system. It’s alive! The Sportsmen for Responsible Energy Development is a coalition site aimed at hunting and fishing groups in the Rocky Mountains, trying to get the groups signed on to good energy-development practices in the Mountain West. The site’s quite simple and a CMS like Joomla is almost overkill, but it makes the thing very easy to maintain, which I hope will help the campaign use it as an actual communications tool — over the years, I’ve seen too many of these things essentially sit on a shelf once built.
The process was definitely fun — in the few days between traveling for SXSW Interactive and Nonprofit Technology, I learned the essentials of both CSS page layout and Joomla templating, which I do not recommend doing at the same time unless you’re really into teeth-grinding frustration. But everything’s worked out fine and the client’s happy, so cha-ching! and we don’t have to eat the cat THIS month. BTW, Joomla and CSS purists will note that I cheated in a couple of places if they view source on the site (image map? what image map?), but what is a rule if it can’t be broken?
– cpd
4 comments March 26th, 2008 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
