Finally, a CMS is chosen.

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Written by Phuc

Tuesday, 12 May 2009 23:50

So I finally decided on a content management system for my new *portfolio* blog-- Joomla. There are many CMS that exists, which made it very difficult to choose from. So how do we know which one is better?

I was actually in the process of coming up with ideas for several blogs to add to my Bizarre site with the intent of using Joomla anyways, but for my portfolio, I was hoping for something lighter. I researched on free blogs hosted off of external servers like Google's Blogger or Wordpress.com to see if there is the capability to embed or integrate blog entries/comment options onto my own website (my porfolio), as if the blog was on MY site without iframes, redesign, or "building around" the CMS.After several hours of searching and digging on the web for information, I discovered that Google Blogger had what they call "FTP Publishing" where you would set up Blogger to point to your existing website address to where you want your blog and then move any existing blog files (html) to your server. You would still create blog entries as normal using their tools, but each time you add an entry you would have to publish it again, and it will automagically create the files to that folder. If you know PHP, you can remove the extra code (head tags, body tags, etc) to turn it into an include file, then include it to your existing website pages. This sounds very time consuming and tedious that would take up server space anyways plus a copy of your blog site would not be at blogger.com anymore. So I passed up on that.

There were other ways to "integrate" your existing blog to an existing website, but not exactly what I wanted:

* Blogger had an option in configuring it to use your domain url instead of their yoursigninname.blogger.com But with that, there's no way to embed just the entries/comments onto your existing website.

* Install/implement something like an an RSS reader to display a teaser and a "more.." link, but it doesn't look like you can browse all entries or necessarily see comment links, and clicking "more..." usually redirects you to the the blog site.

* There's applications that would create a "widgit" to put on your site that displays a snippet of your entries, but it acts more like an RSS reader.

* CloverContent.com is a light CMS that could be integrated to an existing website. It sounds pretty cool, but the developer might put his ads on your entries later on.

After researching, I decided that maybe it would just be better to sacrifice server space for convenience and control. So the best solution for me would probably be to install a CMS onto my site, even if it means I would have to install multiple times for separate blogs. I've already researched and experimented with two popular CMS, Joomla and Wordpress. Both are very good choices; it's just a matter of preference.

Wordpress is more for a designer because it is simple enough to install and use right away with minimal configurations required. Templates are plug and play and it's good enough for simple things. Sites using Wordpress have the same overall structure/layout and is focuses more on blogging.

Joomla on the other hand, has tons of features, and configuration options. It's harder identify a Jooma site from a regular website because it can be turned into a full featured website with any design desired. Templates are completely customizable if you know PHP. But Joomla needs much more time to learn. It isn't exactly a simple install and use right away... so I could see why designers might shy away and programmers using this opportunity to build out what they want. So that is why I chose Joomla. I had a discussion with a friend of mine who studied web design and also pointed this out; he prefers Wordpress.

The only thing is that there isn't an easy way to simply plug into my website. The easy alternative solution is having to "build around" Joomla in order to make it look like my portfolio. So after the redesign and launch of my portfolio, I created a template in Joomla, (which is in a different directory) adding some of the same divs, linking to same css file and some includes files (with my headers/footers) that my portfolio already has. It was fairly quick. Then I can use the Joomla interface and add modules (ads, polls, whatever) on the side of the blog if I want. One other thing is having to set up the .htaccess file in Apache with regular expressions that would point to the blog with a url other than like /joomla. More like http://portfolio.bizarreXpressions.com/blog or something.

So that's how I came to my decision with Joomla and the overall of what I had to do to get things going. I found that I can do a lot of things with Joomla as a developer and incorporate it to my existing site so that it looks like a part of my site. There are a lot of other popular CMS out there that I haven't explored yet; whatever CMS is best for you all depends on your preference, patience, and needs.

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