September 19th, 2010
Whilst working on my first large scale Joomla Website I encountered a number of pretty perplexing errors.
Firstly SEO and the .htaccess file. No matter what settings I used on the .htaccess file I seemed to end up with an internal 500 server error. I finally got it going but after hours of work.
Then onto the contact form. Whilst setting up the basics of a contact form everything worked fine, form sent received, oh and another error number 200 this time appearing in the head of the html page whilst still printing out the page intact! Not being a joomla expert I looked for ways around the problem. Chrono Forms popped up and allowed a WYSIWYG interface for creating forms within Joomla and they sent, hey presto! Without the error message!
But the error message was not gone for long, appearing now randomly alongside search results.
All along this fruitless journey I had tried in vain to contact the hosts “Network Solutions” in order to ask them if this was related to the settings their end. Contact was brusque to say the least, 30 hours after a support ticket was opened I would receive a message stating the problem was related to Joomla and to seek advice on the Joomla Forum – Gee thanks!!!
I was pretty nervous about moving the site to a new host, with all these error messages with no explanation found I wondered whether I was up to the job. However using the akeeba backup module and with the help of a decent host www.inchhosting.co.uk it really was not hard at all.
So all in all I just realised how crucial your hosts are, the problem all along was Network Solutions not me, I also realised not to be apprehensive to move hosts – if I can do it then anyone can!
Posted in Development, Joomla | No Comments »
June 24th, 2010
Being somewhat a Drupal aficionado recently I dove into WordPress specifically on the request of a student of the Marbella Design Academy. The first result of this wordpress discovery is this blog, the second was a port from Typepad to WordPress of a clients blog www.andaluciadiary.com with the help of a programmer friend www.williameaton.co.uk and this wonderful tutorial from http://foliovision.com/2008/11/17/typepad-to-wordpress. Almost simultaneously I began work on a business directory for inclusion in a Joomla site, so all in all recently I got a taste of all of the top cms’s at once!
So what to say about the differences between these content management systems and blogging softwares after so much dispute between the users of each!
Firstly Drupal, I love it and trust it, its expandable and limitless, its got a steep learning curve but once you are there you can create anything, literally anything! WordPress really impressed me, straight out of the box with a backend interface thats intuitive its a great blogging tool and with all the beautiful themes being created would be a neat alternative to drupal for a small basic site with content management capabilities. Typepad, forget it! Complete waste of time to pay monthly for something that requires hours of time and money for you when you want to move over to something else and Joomla hhhm, bit mixed on that. Joomla always came up as a drupal rival when I was originally researching which content management system to choose as a company product whilst head of web design at Andalucia Web Solutions. The fact is it simply just does not rival drupal on any level, it feels clink clunk and its seo capability out of the box is more than poor, I mean headings that are’nt automatically Heading 1′s, please!!! Effects and theme wise Joomla is plentiful and its quick to get soemthing off the ground but for serious web work its a no. The only thing that has saved me from hating it eternally is this wonderful plugin from Sobi2, http://www.sigsiu.net/sobi2.html.
This plugin functioning as a CCK construction kit is simply marvellous, time saving and effective if you want to solely create a business directory and you are more designer than programmer I recommend using Joomla on the strength of this alone. However if I had to choose I’m afraid its still Drupal all the way even on the first date 
Tags: Drupal, Joomla, sobi 2, typepad, Wordpress
Posted in Development, Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress | No Comments »
