This blog entry is a quick overview of building the Niftybean website using the popular open-source Joomla! CMS (content management system).
About a month ago I started looking for an open source CMS - something which did a good job of core functionality such as blogging, social media integration and article management. Getting into PHP wasn't one of my aims - so it was great to discover that Joomla managed this core functionality pretty well, and it has a massive user base and thriving extension and template community.
A friend who'd used Joomla to build aspellcarbon.com led me to discover the plethora of template sites (this site's look & feel is built on a JoomlaArt template) and after that it was a no-brainer.
Extensions
These extensions have stood out for me. Where they have commercial counterparts, it's hard to imagine why you'd bother paying!
- Ninja Shadowbox by NinjaForge. A slick lightbox/slideshow with great embedded video playback support.
- yvComment - Full-featured, well documented, works great. The configurability is endless. Don't waste time on anything else (I already did...)
- CssJsCompress - Rolls up your JavaScript and CSS server resources into single files, and if PHP's zlib is available you can choose to compress them too. Saves a lot of client/server chatter and bandwidth
Site Development Tips
A few Joomla tips I learned when making this site.
Use SEF Urls
No excuses - make these work for you. Some answers in the Joomla help forms suggest "fixing" Apache mod_rewrite by turning off SEF. Do it the other way around! Fix your .htaccess file and keep the SEF urls.
"invisible" menu links
I found it handy to create invisible menus which aren't published anywhere. Each entry is going to be an ordinary Joomla menu item. Using a SEF URL name, you can now refer to each menu item via any other locations without exposing the menu structure.
Write custom html modules using mod_custom
Even the plain vanilla html snippets can do a better job than what some of the extensions try to achieve. With some DOM/JavaScript wizardry and using known class id's you could really go to town here.
Auto-populate alias
When writing a new article (or anything that has an alias) type in the title, then use the "Apply" button to populate the alias field. For example if your title is "Building Niftybean's website with Joomla", type that in and click apply to get "building-niftybeans-website-with-joomla". Wish someone had told me that one earlier :)
Wrapping up
I'm looking forward to seeing more structured data, microformats, RDF etc. making their appearance in more content modules.
Once you understand the Joomla default classification system and you start to pick the right extensions, everything starts falling into place nicely. If you really need to customize the structure of the content in different ways (perhaps for an entirely different data hierarchy) some of the other CMS systems are probably better. But if your data model fits Joomla's classification well, it should do very nicely for you.
There have just been a handful of moments which tested my patience, so by that measure it's a winner.
Great work to everyone who as helped make Joomla what it is today.
