Monadlug notes: uniq and Joomla!, 8-Feb-2007

[Ted Roche]

Charlie Farinella called the meeting to order promptly at 7 PM and
cracked his whip to stick to his streamlined agenda. Brief
announcements ("find GNHLUG events on www.gnhlug.org") were followed
by Ray Côté's presentation of uniq. Ray explained the function and
then introduced an increasingly complex set of examples, one building
on another to show how uniq could remove duplicate lines from a sorted
file, display various counts of duplicates and so forth.

Guy Pardoe was the main presenter. After the requisite wrestling with
the projector, Guy talked about Joomla! Guy had hoped to be showing
version 1.5, but it is still in early beta (beta 1 with beta 2 due
rsn), so he didn't feel it was ready to talk about for production
sites. Guy explained when he volunteered for the presentation he
thought 1.5 would be available, and promised to return when 1.5 was
available and he had some experience in using it for production work.
He briefly reviewed Barrie North's presentation from DLSLUG last year
({1}, registration required) (and [2] our notes from that meeting).
Guy then showed us the Joomla! install he had done that day,
highlighting the basic features of the CMS and the ease of use of the
administrative interface. It appeared to be a very open and accessible
system. Templates and CSS files could be edited from within the
interface and they appeared to be XHTML and CSS2 compliant.

A general Q&A followed. General concerns on the security of the core
framework. Concern about the timeliness of the 1.5 release. General
discussion of what CMS could do and what the target market was.

After the main presentation, the floor was opened up for general
discussion. Maddog announced that he and Bill Sconce had met with
faculty at the New Hampshire Technical Institute and that a plan to
hold a series of MythTV Installfests was proposed (see the -org list
for details).

Answering another question that has come up on the discusssion list, I
came across this post while I was looking for Barries presentation.
While he is advocating for Joomla!, of course, he may be pointing out
that WordPress would meet some peoples needs as well.

"Why you want to use Joomla! instead of WordPress"

http://www.compassdesigns.net/joomla-blog/joomla-reviews/why-you-want- 
to-use-joomla-instead-of-wordpress.html

Thirteen attendees were at the meeting. Thanks to Charlie for running  
the meeting, Ray and Guy for presenting, Ken and the Monadnock SAU  
for providing the facilities, and to maddog and all attendees for  
participating!

{1} http://www.compassdesigns.net/index.php? 
option=com_docman&Itemid=52&task=cat_view&gid=27

[2] http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.org.user-groups.linux.gnhlug/6799

-- 
Ted Roche
Ted Roche & Associates, LLC
http://www.tedroche.com