NCG on Joomla

[drewan]

I spent a couple hours last night monkeying around with my Joomla installation.

I bought an eBook yesterday on Joomla 1.5 beta, which I hoped would still be close enough for the Joomla 1.2 version that is installed on the server. Ooops... guess it isn't. They've at least made some major changes to templates, so I can't install the demo templates from the book into my installed Joomla. Doh! I guess I'll wait and finish the book when the final version of 1.5 comes out and Dreamhost updates to it.

I did figure out how to personalize a template though. I found a good template called Ellipse from ibolddesign.com, and then modified it for our own use. While the .zip package from ibolddesign.com installed easily into Joomla using the web import process, I couldn't get my new zips containing the modified version to install correctly. I think this has something to do with my making the changes or creating the zip on a Mac. I eventually figured out where the templates are installed to, so I was able to do a manual installation via FTP, which I actually think was easier because now I can update a single element rather than having to re-import the whole template.

My guinea pig site is the new NCGaylaxians.com site. If I make a good site for them using Joomla, I'll probably try changing a few other sites over.

Click here to see how the new NCGaylaxians.com site looks with Joomla. I think the look and feel is pretty much there. Now I need to work out the site structure.

Comments

[dracut.livejournal.com]

The template looks good.

Say, are you also hosting gaylaxians.org? I believe so, but then I forget all these little details.

If so, perhaps when you've worked out all the kinks for your CMS, we can update the GSFS site to take advantage of it? The biggest problem we've had is that people can't do their own content. Does it also support a BBS/Forum feature?

[drewan.livejournal.com]

Yes, I'm hosting gaylaxian.org.

I'd be happy to setup that site with Joomla too, as soon as I got the bugs worked out for NCG.

Umm... I'm not sure if it has a BBS/Forum. I'll check the Joomla extensions page and see. If not, we could also setup phpbb which is a pretty standard BBS/Forum application.

[boywhocantsayno.livejournal.com]

I can't seem to connect to your Joomla version - it's timing out on me. (Hm, I can't connect to the "in progress" version, either.) Is that because you're currently working on it? I was hoping to be able to compare it with the look and feel Xoops gives to the Polaris site.

[drewan.livejournal.com]

Hmm... it works fine for me. Are you going to the correct page?

http://www.ncgaylaxians.com/joomla/

[boywhocantsayno.livejournal.com]

I was clicking on the link in your post. It's working fine now, though - it must have been a temporary hiccup. The site seems to have some similarity to the Xoops look, with the menu location, the login form, and so forth, though it's obviously customizable.

One weird thing that I noticed is that when I click on one of the links in the menu at the top (Home/Contact Us/FAQs/Search/Links) I get a rather large dotted white square around the item I clicked on, which takes up the entire height of the menu bar. I've never seen a menu behave quite like that before. It doesn't happen in IE, though, just Firefox.

Other than that, though, everything looks good.