Posts Tagged ‘CMS’

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Hey, I’m alive and stuff like that. :)


10 Mar

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Posted in Rambles, Random | No Comments »

Wow,

It’s hard to believe it’s been almost a month since I have last updated this blog.  Not really sure, its crossed my mind a few times, and I’ve even logged into wordpress and done some plug-in updates.  Oh well I guess. Its life in some way shape or form

What’s new you might ask?

Not that much really.  I’ve been spending my time slowly but diligently working on my class projects, mostly for WDMD 480.

We are starting to get a handle on what all needs to be done. One client’s site is almost ready to go, waiting on a module that we are building to make the site look cleaner, and then fix the content up a bit and it should be ready to go.

The other site is a little bit of a nightmare.  We are converting a Joomla! 1.0.x site to a 1.5.x site.  It’s not a very easy change, and on top of that we are redesigning the site.  I’m still trying to decide the best upgrade path from taking their data, and or just starting from scratch.

Ironically that is where I am now, Sitting in the computer lab working on some prototype designs and what ever else is on my to-do list that never ends.

I guess I should be off to work on that some more.

If you want more of a snapshot of what is going on with me, and my never-ending rants, be sure to check me out on twitter.com/freekie

Cheers for now,

Corey

P.S.

Things should start picking up soon on here for postings I hope :)

Joomla!1.6 Alpha2


10 Feb

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Posted in Random | No Comments »

I spent a few seconds tonight(Ok maybe half an hour) playing with the early Alpha version,

My first impressions are that it’s still an alpha, and thus not a polished product, but it does show some great potential.  The access lists need a bit of work globally.  Drupal has a great example of how to do this correctly.

I’ll try to write a more thoughtful posting and review of it in the near future.

GoogleGoogleGoogleGoogle and Branding


08 Feb

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Posted in Rants, Raves, School | No Comments »

Tonights ranting is on: Trademark and branding

Over my winter session of classes, my professor introduced us to a website. It was more so to show us how social media and random websites can have such a larger following then even our local papers.  We compared our Stevens Point Journal, to GoogleGoogleGoogleGoogle.com

Alexa's Reach of Google*4 and UWSP

As you can see, GoogleGoogleGoogleGoogle has a higher daily reach then even UWSP, and even a lot more than the Stevens Point Journal.

GoogleGoogleGoogleGoogle’s idea was quite simple.  It was 4 iframes on the page each pointing to Google.  You could resize the windows; point them to other sites and a few other pretty cool tasks.  I made a comment to Professor Krause, about wondering how long it would take before Google complained about the use of their trademark.  The site clearly didn’t alter content or gain anything from the users, however because of the domain name, it does violate Google’s trademark claims. We were not sure how long it would be, but figured Google would likely find it soon enough.

Today during class, I went to GoogleGoogleGoogleGoogle to do some side-by-side searching, to find a note from the site’s author saying the site was going to be taken down because of a take down notice that they received from Google.

I am going to miss the site, because it did come to be pretty useful.  Trademarks and branding are important to a person and company.  From Google’s side, if they don’t protect their trademark, they risk losing it.

It brings me to a new point as well.  I’ve gone by the nickname Freekie for most of my “Online” life.  I’ve moved away from it slightly, using CoreyRants.com instead of my old Freekie.net.  Mostly because the projects I’ve started on freekie.net have never worked, and Corey Rants seems to be more about what I blog about. Rants, raves and other stuff that happens in my life.    I’m thinking of possibly switching my twitter nickname from Freekie to Corey Rants.  It would create a single online presence, but haven’t decided what I want to do just yet.

I’ll keep you all updated as I progress on the Twitter handle.

Feel free to stop over to GoogleGoogleGoogleGoogle.com and write the author a few well wishes.

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Edit

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Professor Krause also wrote about this, check out his take on the topic.

Final Project


19 Jan

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Posted in Rambles, School | 2 Comments »

Finding motivation for my final project this term has been slightly frustrating.  I hope to  give a link to my finished project shortly (It is Due Thursday afterall).

Building  a site with a CMS System takes time, and a lot of planning.  My advice for anyone that is looking to build/ or transition to a CMS site, is to plan your content.  If you are not able to have the content ready ahead of time, at least come up with a plan of navigation and structure for how you want to order them.  It makes life easier.

Perhaps one of the better ways to organize content ahead of time, would be to use a program like Visio.  Visio allows you to make different prototypes of things, from websites, to network drawings, to even a good outline program.

Its going to be a few long nights and work ahead to get the project done.  But, once its done, getting more content down the road will be the ongoing project.

Also, plan that everything you want to do, will take a lot longer and will not go as easily as you expect. Because you might end up distracted, maybe by clocks, Thanks Professor Krause, or even just finding the right plugin.

Joomla! vs Drupal


13 Jan

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Posted in Reviews, School | 1 Comment »

Today in CMS Class we moved away from our Joomla! discussion and took a peak at Drupal.  Drupal is a very powerful CMS system.  While I have used Drupal before for class work, it is always interesting to go back and take a second and third look at systems to see how their features actually work.

After spending more time with Joomla, I have found a few things with Joomla that I prefer over Drupal.  Joomla’s administrator access is a completely different backend, and even a separate login system.  Drupal’s system for administrating works, but how you float back and forth from the front end to the back end of the site is weird to me.  I’m sure I would get used to it over time, however at the time being, I prefer having them be separate.  Perhaps it is a false sense of security, but by keeping everything separate and hidden it seems more secure to me.

Drupal does have a few more pieces of a site that I like that are built in, such as the forum feature.  The reason that I like this better than Joomla, is that by being in the core functions, it’s more likely to get updated and be kept up-to-date.  With Joomla, most plugins are written by 3rd parties, which this is true of Drupal, because more core features are included with Drupal. It’s likely to be more secure than adding in more plugins.

Overall, I think that for most people, Joomla will be a better option than Drupal for ease of use, and configuration.   I’m open to suggestions and am curious as to what others have thought about Drupal and or Joomla and other CMS systems that they have played with.

If you are curious as to how the CMS systems work, but don’t have a working install, It would be worth checking out http://php.opensourcecms.com/ you can play with most Open CMS systems for free and usually a fast option to play before you install.

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Corey's Rants

A Web Developer's rants, raves and randomness.