Websites

I have been in a frenzy the past couple of weeks looking atdifferent web templates for a site that I am thinking about.  As aTechnology Director of a small school it is hard to find quality technologyresources that I can afford and when none exist, I have to coble somethingtogether.  There are several good sitetemplates out there, but I have focused on just two.. Joomla! andWordpress.  Below is what I have found...

 

Rating:

Joomla☺ - for the shininess of it..NOT the install

Wordpress ☺ ☺ ☺ - because it just works.

Joomla!:  This is one of the newer finds that was mentioned to me by afellow Tech Director and was eager to try it out.  The installation was for the most partpainless, if you are accustomed to white-hot pokers being stabbed in your eye(or else where) repeatedly.  Yes, theyhave a web based install method that looks very good.  It will walk you through setting up your siteand associating it with a database.  Thatpart is easy.  Where you start to run into trouble is when you complete all the steps and hit the final Finishbutton.  There is a very small message atthe bottom of the page that tells you that setup could not write to theconfiguration.php file while at the very top in large red letter it is tellingyou to completely remove the installation folder.  

 

What appears to be happing is that the Anonymous InternetUser account does not have write access to the file.  Fine I can deal with that, give it writeaccess with IIS and every thing is happy right? Wrong…  You have to go to the web-root folder andgive it the permission from the security tab!.. Think about this.  Is it wise to leave a config file world writable?  IMHO - Nope. Then manually edit the file in atxt editor.  After you do this you canbring up the page.  However, when you login to the Admin interface and try to make more global changes you will not beable to unless you leave the config file world writable.   Ohh,and just incase you have tried to install Joomla and wanted to go to the forumsfor help – forget it.  They will tell youto check to make sure that the config file is in the correct directory and gothrough the set up again.  Or the willmove your post to another forum with out posting a link to where they movedit. 

 

Over all my impression was that the Joomla group is more interestedin eye-candy than making a quality product that works.

 

Wordpress: I have used word press for quite awhile and havebeen very impressed with the install, support forums and easy of use. There area lot of templates available to set your site up almost any way you want.  I know, Wordpress is a blogging suite, but itis not that hard to turn in to a stable and very usable web site.  I had one site that I wanted to work as amobile gateway.  I looked on Wordpressand found an add-on for it.  In 5 minutesI had a site that was accessible to mobile phones. Give it a try, it may surpriseyou.

 

My over all impression was that Wordpress just works.  There are a lot of tweaks that you can do anda lot of templates to use.  If you want ano-hassle web site this is a good way to go.

 

I will be digging out an old web site suite that have usedin the past to give another review soon. It is called Plone and runs on Python and Zope.  I need to configure my web server to make itwok so bear with me.  From what Iremember it is very customizable and fairly easy to use. 

 

More later…

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