Melbourne JoomlaDay 2009

Melbourne JoomlaDay 2009 will take place at Melbourne University on Saturday 7th February and Sunday 8th February. From the site :

"Joomla is an award-winning Content Management System (CMS) that will help you build websites and other powerful online applications. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everybody. Visit Joomla's official website.

Beginners will get a jump-start into Joomla, learn how to set up their first Joomla site. Designers will gain deep insight into Joomla 1.5 templating. Implementors and Developers will enjoy myriads of tips and tricks out of the core developers’ toolbox.

Joomla is an award-winning Content Management System (CMS) that will help you build websites and other powerful online applications. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everybody."

Registrations close on 21 January if they don't sell out before then (apparently it did sell out last year so you might want to get in early).

Drupal : Themed Taxonomy

As discussed in my last post we've been looking at CMS's at work. In particular we did some tests with Drupal and TextPattern. We seem to have settled on Drupal. Mostly because of an existing (and stable) LDAP module. For our tests we looked at an existing project that was built as a static site with editors using Contribute. In the next iteration of this site we need to look at adding search functionality as well as making the structure more flexible without loosing the strengths of the current site. Those strengths offer some very real challenges to any CMS. Specifically the site uses over 20 distinct templates because each themed area has it's own look. In researching Drupal I eventually came across the Taxonomy Theme module which may offer the best way to handle this. I've installed it twice now ; once on our development server and once on my laptop. Both times I initially assumed that enabling the Taxonomy module would make it magically appear (it doesn't). Both times I thought that installing and enabling the module would make it appear (it doesn't). In fact like most Drupal modules you need to find the modules settings page (Administer > By Module > Taxonomy Theme > Taxonomy Theme) after enabling it. Enabling the module in the Global settings allows you to then select a different theme for each Taxonomy term (available from the Taxonomy tab in the Taxonomy Theme area). Obviously you'll need to define a taxonomy and create a list of terms first.

The thing that surprises me is that enabling any module in Drupal requires a very similar process and yet despite this we still intend to move forward with Drupal. We move forward in the full knowledge that we as developers have much to learn so that our users will have little to learn.

TextPattern : Quality not hype

I haven't had much time to post for the last fortnight. But there has been lots I wanted to talk about. One reason I've been time poor is that we've been doing some research into Content Management Tools to cover the needs of some upcoming projects. In the end we installed and tested two systems; Drupal and TextPattern. This short list was partly derived by running available CMS based sites through the W3C validator. TextPattern was the only CMS that validated cleanly and Drupal was fairly close. But in the end some popular choices from our shortlist quickly disappeared as they had so many validation errors.

The inclusion of TextPattern was a big surprise. We currently have a casual working for us who is a real TextPattern fan. I kept saying ; but you wouldn't be able to do x in TextPattern and almost everytime the answer was yes. In fact almost anything you would want to do with Drupal could be done with TextPattern. Though in every example there was one major difference between the two : TextPattern was easier. Everything in Drupal requires three semi-obscure steps to set it up. While everything in TextPattern required one click and a save.

There were things we really needed that weren't available for TextPattern (ie. LDAP validation) so in the end we decided on Drupal. But if you are looking for a CMS and your needs aren't too complicated then I suspect you won't go to far wrong using TextPattern.