What on earth is Joomla?  It’s a content management system for your website.  This blog is written on WordPress, which is also a content management system.  A very simple one.  Joomla is a little more advanced, but not by any stretch of the imagination the most complicated system at your disposal.  Another system, slightly more complex is Drupal.

WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal are all developed using Open Source methodologies and licensing.  That means they are available to anyone for free.  I could have installed Joomla on one of my websites, but I decided I wanted to work on it in a local environment, stored on my hard drive on my Mac Mini.  To be able to do that, I needed to instal MAMP, which stands for Mac, Apache, MySQL, and PHP.  Mac, of course, allows it to work on my Mac operating system, Apache is a web server, MySQL is a database, and PHP is a programming language which WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal are programmed in.  When you purchase service from a web service provider, the Apache, MySQL, and PHP are all included — along with a lot of other things you probably don’t think about.

I decided to learn Joomla.  The MAMP installation was painless.  Joomla installed easily, too.  After that I was lost. In conjunction with installing the software, I also signed up for OpenSourceTraining.  I found a deal for six months unlimited access for $37 ($99 value), so I decided to give them a try.  They have on line training classes for HTML, CSS, PHP, WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal.  Similar training is also available for free via W3Schools and HTML Dog.

I’ve heard people express dismay at how complicated WordPress is, and I’ve always been somewhat surprised by that.  Sure, the inner workings of WordPress are complicated, but the basic point and click operation has always struck me as pretty painless.

Joomla is not.  Well, technically, it is.  But the options are overwhelming.  After playing with it most of today, I’m starting to grasp a few things.  Elements are either published (you can see them) or unpublished (you can’t see them), and that’s how the configuration is managed.  That’s an oversimplification, but that’s what I’ve started to figure out.

Today, I’ve managed to change the title on the site from “Joomla!” to “Polar Bear Pit.”  I’ve figured out how to remove the sidebar but not how to get it to display somewhere else on the page (I think I know a little about what to do for that, but the whole picture hasn’t formed in my brain yet).  Menus and templates are key.

I had reason to want to use a particular extension, and that was a little tricky to figure out how to get it to install, then figuring out how to get it to display slowed me down for a while.  The training videos have been helpful.  I let them run and when they get where they have the information I need, I pause them while I carry out that task, then I resume them.

With this complexity comes powerful capability, so I’m looking forward to learning this.