Content Management Systems

Articles related to my usage and experimentation with Content Management Systems (CMS). This page lists all posts in the category, in reverse chronological order.

• Note: An AI Generated pill displayed in the list below indicates that the post description displayed on the page was generated from the post content using Generative AI (GenAI). The post content itself was written by a human (me).

• Joomla Article Conversion to Markdown

  Posted November 23, 2022  in Content Management Systems, Static Site Generators
  

  As I prepared to migrate this site from Joomla! 3 to something built on a Static Site Generator, I created a utility to help me migrate the site data (database-driven) to individual markdown files for each article. This post describes that utility.

• Site Upgrade Coming

  Posted November 11, 2022  in Content Management Systems
  

  This site ran on Joomla! for more that ten years and it became time to migrate the site to something else. This post announces the planned migration.

• Hackers Hacking My Joomla Site's Images Folder

  Posted April 7, 2017  in Content Management Systems
  

  For many months I'd been dealing with hackers beating up this site (when it ran on Joomla); this article describes how it locked it down and stopped the hacking.

• Migration Completed

  Posted April 27, 2015  in Content Management Systems
  

  Announcing that I completed an upgrade of this site to the latest version of Joomla!

• Using Joomla K2

  Posted August 25, 2013  in Content Management Systems
  

  I've started work on the web site for my upcoming book, Apache Cordova Programming.

• Using GeSHi in Joomla

  Posted February 21, 2013  in Content Management Systems
  

  If you've been poking around within this site, you may have noticed that I used to post a bunch of source code to the site. I don't write as much code as I used to and much less than I'm accustomed to, but when I setup this site, I found myself posting a bunch of code and wanting to make it render properly on the site's pages.

• Using jUpgrade

  Posted February 17, 2013  in Content Management Systems
  

  I've upgraded a few sites lately from Joomla! 1.5 to Joomla! 2.5 using jUpgrade. The upgrade from 1.5 to 2.5 isn't exactly an upgrade, it's more of a migration, so you really have to use tools like jUpgrade to make it work.

• Updated Site

  Posted January 24, 2013  in Content Management Systems
  

  Well, I finally did it – I completed the site's upgrade from Joomla! 1.5 to 2.5. I started the project back in August and I haven't been working on the project the whole time. I just ran into a couple of small, nagging issues and stepped away from it for a while as I worked on other things (like my day job). Of course, Joomla! 3.0 came out in the meantime, so I have to make plans to do that upgrade soon (as 3.0 is way, way cool and implements some features I really want to use on the site).

• Joomla Upgrade

  Posted August 7, 2012  in Content Management Systems
  

  I'm knee deep into a major upgrade for this site. I've been running it on Joomla 1.5 for years now and I thought it was time to get caught up on Joomla versions. Of course, there's no simple path from Joomla 1.5 to 2.5, so I had to do a migration. There's a cool migration tool called jUpgrade that essentially copies your existing site to a new folder and migrates all of the content. It worked like a champ and I'm in the process of doing all of the clean-up that has to happen.

• Drupal 7

  Posted November 21, 2011  in Content Management Systems
  

  I've been using Joomla! for some time now and I've gotten quite comfortable with it. Recently I've been helping August's cub scout pack, a neighbor and close friend build web sites using Joomla! and I've gotten pretty competent with it.

• Concrete5

  Posted June 28, 2011  in Content Management Systems
  

  A while back I got really interested in content management systems (CMS). When I discovered Joomla!, I quickly created this site and hundreds of articles later it's still going strong. A few years ago, Wired Magazine (I think it was Wired) did an article about an open source CMS called Concrete5 (www.concrete5.org) and it looked…interesting. I installed a copy of it, but never really got the hang of it. I didn't have a site I wanted to build at the time, so I didn't really have a reason to use it and that probably affected my experience with the product. Ultimately though, I think I really didn't understand what it was. I was used to Joomla! and Drupal and expected Concrete5 to be like those other CMS's. It's not really, where normal CMS's are database & template driven systems for displaying content, Concrete5 is more of a web site builder that uses a database in the back-end to store the content. It's for building sites with pages rather than creating articles, links and other things that are rendered by the CMS templates.

• Moving a Joomla Site

  Posted November 5, 2009  in Content Management Systems
  

  I use Joomla! to manage many of the sites I've built. It's an open source CMS and it's really pretty cool. As I was building blackberrybooks.org yesterday I made a big mistake and thought I'd write about it.
  I host all of my sites on fatcow.com, they're really great and have some amazing tools site administrators like me can use to manage their sites, install open source tools, create databases, create mail accounts and more. One of the tools is something called InstallCentral that basically points to scripts that can be used to install all sorts of open source tools (content management systems, blogs, galleries, forums, e-commerce stuff and more). It was through this tool that I first discovered Joomla! and although Joomla! is pretty easy to install, I've always just let FatCow's InstallCentral install it.

• Joomla FTP Settings

  Posted November 3, 2009  in Content Management Systems
  

  I've been catching up on my Joomla reading; I picked up a few Joomla books over the last few months and I had some time the other day flying forth and back from Houston for a job interview so I took the books with me. One of the things they mention in some of the books is that to avoid file ownership problems, you should configure Joomla to use FTP to upload files. I have been trying to get the Joomla Content Editor (JCE) installed (with NO success) so I thought I'd try this configuration option to see if it helped me with my JCE problems.

• Drupal Problems

  Posted November 3, 2009  in Content Management Systems
  

  I started playing with Drupal a while back because I wanted to see how one of the other Open Source CMS worked. I'd been thinking about building a site called blackberrybooks.org and decided to use Drupal for it.

• Learning Drupal

  Posted July 24, 2009  in Content Management Systems
  

  I had an idea for a new web property (I'm not saying what yet) and thought it would be something cool to create using a different Content Management System(CMS) than Joomla (the CMS I'm using for all of my other sites). I selected Drupal because it was another CMS FatCow installed for free but also because of what many people have said about it online. It's interesting; Drupal is more configurable and more flexible than Joomla - more targeted at developers. It has less modules, but much much more flexibility in how it's configured and how data renders. I'll start working more on the site in a few months and we'll see what happens.

• Joomla is Amazing

  Posted June 5, 2009  in Content Management Systems
  

  Joomla! is absolutely amazing. I discovered this open source Content Management System a month or so ago when looking at the free tools my ISP (FatCow) provides. I setup one site and very quickly had Joomla running almost every one of my sites (the only one that isn't Joomla yet is my McNelly SoftWorks site. I purchased a book on the technology (as soon as you try to add a menu item in Joomla you will know why I had to purchase a book to learn how to use this thing).

Header image: Photo by Alvaro Reyes on Unsplash.