Notes from MonadLUG, 10-April-2008: Guy Pardoe and Joomla! 1.5

[Ted Roche]

Sixteen people were present for the April Meeting of the Monadnock Area 
Linux User Group meeting, held as usual on the second Thursday of the 
month at the School Administrative Unit #1 main office off Hancock Road 
in Peterborough.

As is usual with most LUG meetings, we spent the standard ten minutes 
wrestling with monitor settings for the cool new projector. We couldn't 
do better than 640 x 480! so Guy was a trooper and persevered through 
the presentation at teeny resolution. Ouch. We'll have to do some 
research to figure out how to get this new projector system to rock and 
roll.

Guy reminisced about his last presentation [1], (February last year) 
where he had talked about the new version of Joomla, which was due Real 
Soon Now and how he had promised to be back when it was released. In 
April of 2008, he was back to report that 1.5 is released, and the wait 
was worthwhile. In fact, version 1.5.2 is out now.

There was a discussion of the many new content management systems - 
Drupal is another one that's received a lot of attention. Guy had also 
heard another one - ModX (http://modxcms.com/) that he hears all the 
cool kids are playing with.

Guy talked about how the web grew up in a table driven layout just to 
get positioning right, and that as css came along, that was prefered. 
Joomla templates are nearly always 100% CSS and valid HTML with few or 
no tables, and how there's a lot of advantages from better 
accessibility, easier localization, better search engine optimization 
and fewer cavities.

As part of his presentation, Guy downloaded the .zip from the web site 
www.joomla.org, un-zipped the package, copied to an install directory, 
ran the installation (a pre-flight check, verified versions, etc.) and 
he was up and running (Joomla reminded to remove installation). Members 
noted that Guy showed them things about file management using the GNOME 
file manager that no one had bothered to try, since they would have all 
done it from a shell. Guy didn't apologize for being a Windows refugee. 
There's more than one way...

Guy talked about the first presentation of Joomla we saw [2], from 
Barrie North on 7 September 2006 at DLSLUG. Barrie has recently 
published a book [3], which Guy had with him and praised.

Guy gave us tour of the interface, both the public presentation and the 
administrative interface. Built-in default templates are pretty slick. 
The setup wizard was quite graceful. And addons and replacement 
templates seem to be available in huge quantities (Ted: downloading code 
off the internet and installing it to run on your computers without 
inspecting and understanding the code is a Bad Idea. Use only 
trustworthy sites and review what you get.)

Finally, Guy showed off a site he is developing for a client at Bristol 
Elder Care [4] and talked about what was involved in getting the site up 
and running.

Thanks to Guy for a great presentation, to Charlie for organizing the
meeting, to Ken and the SAU for the great facilities.


[1] http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.org.user-groups.linux.gnhlug/8529
[2] http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.org.user-groups.linux.gnhlug/6799
[3] http://www.joomlabook.com/
[4] http://www.bristolelder.org

-- 

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