JoomlAssist Proposal

I don’t like to do Joomla anymore, I vastly prefer to work with WordPress and am as rapidly losing whatever qualifications I had for creating in Drupal and Joomla as I did for hacking and maintaining Windows, which I was much better at – until Ubuntu set me free.

Some of this may inspire WP parallels.

2009-11-12 13:54:52

Executive Abstract of this Letter

Resume Index - My Web Portfolio - montesite.net

My Tutorials for UWM students

www.metrodining.ca- random high end looking Joomla site.There are a lot of options today to enable those needing cheap access to an enterprise quality web presence.We can easily do far better than just to provide web services and hosting. I can create and index lists of resources that enable sites to be easily created, quickly modified, and updated with barely computer literate skill sets.

Regardless of whether we are looking for a very intensive focus on setting up a few clients with web pages and maintaining these sites, or want to take a more labor extensive approach to maximize the number which can be assisted by teaching each to be more self sufficient (leaving more time for expert assistance with graphics, design, advice, and opinion, instead of daily maintenance), there are many open source platforms available for free that can produce a better return on our labors.

Historically, few resources have been as undervalued as online learning resources are right now, especially in such fields as open source CMS use. To do the work of indexing, tagging, and commenting, on such resources can create a lot of value with freely available info and a little time.

I already seek to create an indexing of tutorials, free templates, and other free resources for the beginning Joomla user, enabling people to make professional web sites for free, or very professional sites for very low cost. I also have been working to collect freeware, troubleshooting, and advice, resources, to help people take better control of their Windows machines and be more self sufficient. It has been hard to continue this work over the years, as few, besides my professors, have shown much interest or received much benefit yet, and as I have been using Ubuntu lately myself. The kind of work that WBI does provides the perfect opportunity for me to continue work on creating a site and a work flow that can really make a difference for people who do not have as much training, time, or money, as most people think it takes to achieve an effective and productive web space.

Joomla & Drupal

The Joomla! CMS (Content Management System) has shown many people that it is more important to have an easily modified site accessible to more than just the Webmasters, than to have one that uses all the latest flashy techniques to just look good and do nothing.

Between them, Drupal and Joomla have remained the two most popular Open Source CMSs for many years, despite having been joined by thousands of competitors. Being most widely used, they are also most widely contributed to by Open Source fans.

CMS allows a site to be much more interactive, adaptable, easily posted to, and edited. For individual webmasters similar efforts at hand coding such database integration cannot begin to achieve as much function as quickly and reliably as an average computer literate user can get from Joomla.
Instead of a pretty do nothing site like www.metrodining.ca, it is better to have a visually static page like this http://www.joomlademos.de/home?template=gored_lernvid.com which uses less bandwidth but interacts with your customers, providing additional services. The forms on this site provide such extra functionality instead of connection clogging graphics, yet there is no shortage of visual bang and color http://community.joomla.org/showcase/sites/business/food-and-beverage/marcos-pizza.html.
Optional plugins can easily add more interactive functionality to Joomla, adding value for customers to the product. These two links are to products which allow reservations using forms on the website http://joomlatp.com/joomla-1.5-plugin/Restaurant-Reservation-plugin.html, and to easily design and change menus http://joomlatp.com/joomla-1.5-component/Joomla-Restaurant-component.html.
This kind of updated currency and functional usefullness can be far less frustrating than waiting for a pretty page to load that then does not perform any useful function which a print ad cannot.
Restaurants are a great example here. Ambience is an important part of the service for many restaurants, but it is not the only reason for patronage. People expect that the food will have at least as much value as the setting. Similarly, a nice looking flash site can bring much ambience, but no one goes to a restaurant’s site seeking entertainment, they want to eat or they would not be there.
If a really nice looking template is desired, there are many that can be purchased very cheaply, such as those in this list which are mostly in the $60.00 range:
http://www.joomlatemplateshop.net/index.php/restaurantcafe
Many firms are using such systems to use low cost labor to produce results that are billed for as if much technical skill was required when it was not. The disjunct between the public perception of webmaster skill requirements and increasingly easily automated chimp work creates many profit opportunities. One such opportunity is helping the small business owner get what they need for a good price in a treacherous market.
The problem is that although CMS are much easier to learn and use than the old hand coding and FTP transfers, there are many things about the work flow that are very counter intuitive at first. One can spend days spinning one’s wheels trying to figure out what one is supposed to be doing, especially just getting started all alone. These kinds of frustration that I have had to deal with have shown me what is most important to know and how to avoid the pitfalls. I would love to pass this info on in some more permanent archive so that others do not have to reinvent the wheel.

This seems a great opportunity for me to work on the self help materials and advising skills that I have been wanting to assemble for some time, while also sharpening my more practiced skills of graphic web design, user empathy, and information architecture.

To see a small sample of the range of tutorials already freely available see the link list at the bottom of this page.

Where there are gaps between the diverse and numerous aids and resources available for free, I will create desktop video tutorials (similar to my UWM Alpha Account Filezilla Transfer Tutorial – the first lesson, @ http://montesite.net/os/tutorial/1.html is a fine example – but next time, with more volume).

I do not yet have the tools to quickly create a site like www.metrodining.ca, but the tools are relatively quite cheap and I already have a great interest in purchasing them. Joomla tools and expansions are usually a great deal for the money compared to any similarly effective option. Of course this results in many deals being offered that are not as good as they could be. I can offer good advice on buying templates, extensions, plug-ins, and services. Generally one can get an awful lot in this regard for $15-$50, some useful extensions are even cheaper than that.

One thing is for certain, while www.metrodining.ca is similar to sites that can cost as much as $3000-$4000 or more, it probably came in well under 10% of that. Even if one seeks the very best, Joomla or Drupal can make it better much cheaper.

To look at the Joomla admin interface, or take it for a test drive:

Go to http://montesite.net/joomla/ where there’s more instructions,

or go to Admin Control Panel here: http://montesite.net/joomla/administrator/index.php

In the resulting screen enter this data:Username = humanPassword = admin

The “Content” drop down menu is the most interesting one at first, one can go to “Articles” to post a new article or to edit old ones, or rearrange the front page in “Front Page Manager”. This is also where one adds and edits “Sections” and “Categories” which can greatly help improve the sites usefulness if properly utilized. If one wants to create a link to a new page for an article, category, or section, one must go to the “Menus” drop down menu.

One can also control users, user groups and access levels, installation of extensions and templates, placement and enabling of the different modules, and many other things, from the Admin Control Panel.

Look & Layout, Templates:The “look and feel”, or overall graphic design, of a Joomla Site is controlled by a CSS template. My sites intentionally use the three default templates to keep things simple and consistent, but there are many great templates available for free.Three Default Joomla Templates come with every install:
http://necedahharvest.org/      JA Purity
http://montesite.net/joomla/    Rhuk Milkyway
http://montesite.net/test/         Beez

Default Drupal Template:
http://montesite.net/drupal/                 empty
http://www.wisconsingreenparty.org/  not so empty

I will be creating a list of the best sites offering quality free templates which can be installed gratis. There will also be a growing list of templates displayed on a local server from which to choose.

Some Free Template Lists:

http://www.ogosense.com/portfolio/

http://www.joomla24.com/index.php?set_albumName=album06&option=com_gallery&Itemid=6&include=view_album.php

http://www.bestofjoomla.com/

http://community.joomla.org/showcase/sites/business/food-and-beverage.html

http://community.joomla.org/showcase/sites/searchby/tags/small%20business%20website.html

http://www.estimetemplates.com/free-joomla-templates.html

http://community.joomla.org/showcase/sites/business.html

http://joomla2u.net/category/2-columns/

One that is not free:

http://www.joomla-addons.org/templates/category/111-joomla-templates.html

There are many more, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

I will also be creating a list of resources on how to modify or create Joomla templates, and will work with users to ensure that their sites reflect the branding and intent of the enterprise at hand.As with other training materials, where pre-existing resources are scarce, or where the most relevant materials contain much that is not relevant, I intend to create more training resources to fill such gaps.

The first resource I plan to purchase given additional funds is a recently released template editor, Artisteer http://www.artisteer.com/. Artisteer’s drag and drop interface with buttons allows anyone to easily manipulate templates (for $129.95). This will allow further, and more efficient, customization, and for appropriate branding to be exercised within the available templates, or it can allow entirely new templates to be built to user branding specifications.

Until I have acquired the expertise to create a site like www.metrodining.ca, I will still be a very good judge of prices, and the field of contenders, and will help those who opt to spend some money find better deals on competent Template designs and plug-ins to expand functionality.

There are several business suites of plug-ins and extension modules available for nominal fees that allow better e-commerce integration and more options. I also expect to be investing in some of these for our program. The over head of buying Joomla services and products is low, for there is always a free way that can be wrestled into the desired shape with enough effort, and the ethic of Open Source is the foundation of the industry after all. Quite often a nominal subscription fee is charged over a time period that allows one to download all the materials one is interested in at the time, this will allow me too cheaply and quickly build a library of such assets for this program and public future use.

When I have had some more experience with Artisteer, I will add a form to specify most of the more commonly useful design options in order to standardize, automate, and facilitate, user design input and requests.

As the effort acquires more plug-ins, templates, and extension modules, more pages will go up on a central index to show how to use these options.

My Social Web Apps

Promotion of everything has become common on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and the myriad social web applications. I have spent years trying many of them and finding out which are best for what. As the biggest by far, Facebook has proved to be the king in most respects, but social bookmarking is often ovelooked as a real help to publicizing and promoting sites.

Google ranking, reciprocal links, and other web promotion methods.

Other important resources and information for a neophyte’s web presence include ones about understanding and implementing effective website monetization, promotion, and metrics. This is another skill set that has been made much easier and more effective every day by good technical solutions, especially ones coming from Google. This is another arena where lots of great advice and tutorials can be found online, but they are swamped in even more marginally helpful content promoting the purchase of something the well informed do not really need.

This is another area that I have been keeping up on that this would provide a welcome opportunity for a more intensive focus on: indexing links to best practices and strategies for web metrics, site promotion techniques, better search rankings, reciprocal links, and selling or purchasing advertising.

All of my own intellectual work is always open source, I do not want to own it. The Wisconsin Women’s Business Initiative Corporation will have every right to use it in perpetuity; in return, no party will have control or ownership over my intellectual property. Conversely, all users of the service will retain all ownership of their sites’ content, and any custom work on sites’ templates.

We stand on the shoulders of our forebears, and we owe it to those who have passed their knowledge on to us to reciprocally share our protion of the unlimited bounty of human ingenuity and imagination.

I have no interest in becoming irreplaceable. To me any job done well is one that is documented well enough to be easy to pick up after a disaster or loss of the organizing worker, especially in the information economy. Transparency and good documentation are key to the long term health of any web space.

Let’s create an infrastructure that will allow us to help people help themselves first, so as to have the resources left to provide expert opinions, advice, and skills support.

Some Tutorial Sites:

http://www.compassdesigns.net/joomla-tutorials/
http://www.joomlashack.com/tutorials
http://www.siteground.com/tutorials/joomla15/
http://resources.joomla.org/directory/education/user-admin-tutorials/joomla-tutorials.html
http://joomlatp.com/joomla-1.5-tutorials/
http://www.joomlatutorials.com/joomla-15x.html

Template Tutorials:

http://www.joomlashack.com/tutorials/150-free-tools-for-joomla-design
http://www.joomlashack.com/tutorials/151-blank-template-css-joomla
http://www.joomlashack.com/tutorials/226-joomla-15-template-tutorial

My Resume