New.Journalism.Review

I’ve co-authored the Top 50 Blog Techniques feature which appears in Issue 171 of Web Designer magazine (available now in all good newsagents in the UK  and in other countries). It contains 50 (count ‘em!) tried and tested tips to help you use: WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal and Squarespace.

Joomla! isn’t the most intuitive CMS, so many of my tips are to do with speeding up the process of adding content, locating module positions and creating sections / categories. etc. Four authors wrote the feature and each are experts in the individual CMSs, so it’s a really strong feature.  We didn’t get our bylines on it, which was slightly annoying. Apparently this is being corrected when the feature eventually appears online.

I just wouldn’t recommend this particular feature for absolute CMS beginners. To get the most out of it you’ll need to know the basics of how they work. If you want a quick intro to setting up a Joomla! site, order yourself a copy of Issue 165 instead. You’ll find  a feature that I wrote which takes you through setting up a reasonably decent-looking Joomla! based news site from scratch  and at almost zero cost – it’s so easy once you know how!

This month’s Web Designer magazine includes a tutorial on How to Build a News Site in Joomla! written by me (Steve Hill). By following the 24 steps, readers should end up with a decent looking news site. Well, that’s the general idea.

The tutorial will be particularly useful for charities or schools who are seeking to create a website quickly (I reckon it can be done in 2 to 3 hours!). But it’s well worth a read by anyone looking to create a decent site for (almost) zero cost.

If you read the tutorial and it worked for you, then I would love to hear about it. And if it didn’t work for you – I’m sorry! Let me know, and I’ll try to help out.

Web Designer (Issue 165 – Cleaner Code) is available now from all good newsagents in the UK.

Also, the issue has a wonderful feature lamenting the sad demise of GeoCities. Alongside Tripod, it was the site that got many of us interested in web design in the mid-90s. We’ll miss you GeoCities!

Xaraya or Joomla? We created our journalism news site using Joomla! CMS. A few weeks ago, I went up to visit BBC Sport Interactive. Having seen the CMS its journalist use, I feel pretty confident that our students are getting a good grounding in ‘real world’ working practices. But I’m just wondering if we should scrap Joomla! and teach Xaraya? 

• Unlike Joomla!, Xaraya is used by large media publishers in the UK [so that gets a tick!]
• It’s free [two ticks]
• Its open source [we like Moodle, we like Joomla!....we just LOVE open source]
• And it has a scary name which I can’t spell.[All good CMS have sinister sound names - my favourite is Tridion, which sounds like the latest nuclear weapon system].

So is this something we should be teaching our journalist degree students? How easy is Xaraya to learn and who offers hosting? Will students be able to spell its name, when they already struggle with Joomla!? That’s J-O-O-M-L-A.

So many questions…. 

Here is a quick list of really useful Joomla! Extensions that I have successfully installed. I’m a near Joomla! newbie,,,so if I can install them they must be pretty easy!  Basically extensions are optional improvements you can make to your Joomla! site and CMS. 

JCE (a fantastic WYSIWYG editor)

This really falls into the "essential" download category. You’ve installed Joomla!, now download this! This text editor is more user-friendly (i.e more ‘Word-like’) and offers more text formatting possibilities than than TinyMCE (the standard editor you get with Joomla!). Inserting and resizing images is a hassle with the standard text editor – this works much better. But be warned JCE stores images in a different place than with TinyMCE -  this is another reason why it pays to get it set up early on. Any idiot can install it, here is an easy to follow Flash tutorial here. If it doesn’t appear , make sure that it is enabled for your particular user-name.

All Videos Plugin (an easy way to include vids, whether you host them yourself or have bunged them on YouTube).

It gives you the ability to easily embed online streaming
videos  (e.g. hosted on YouTube) inside your content as well as your own videos
uploaded on your server. Just place a tag inside your content like
{youtube}374536{/youtube}. It’s worth noting that it needs to be installed in the Manbots section, even though it’s called a plug-in. It claims to be able to cope with ALL videos and the list of places you can host your vids is really long….e.g. YouTube, Metacafe, Yahoo! Vid etc etc etc. The one place it seems you can’t host is on Brightcove though. JoomlaWorks also does Simple Image Gallery for still images.

mXcomment (people can comment on your content).
This plug-in from Visual Clinic allows people to comment on your content, but it does a heck of a lot more than just that! Users can print, email, bookmark the article, add it to del.icio.us and find related articles. The buttons that appear on your site look brilliant, imagine the Apple website’s sleek design. You can tinker with what appears on your site using the equally sexy interface below. A fantastic replacement to AkoComment (also from Visual Clinic). A rival to mXComment is JomComment, which also has many fans.

I’ve been busy attempting to create a university news site using Joomla! CMS. The budget: zero. The aim is to teach online journalism students about the workings of an open source CMS and how to upload content. The focus is on online editorial skills, so we don’t want them spending ages learning loads of code.

Hosting:

If you’ve not seen the previous post, the story so far is that I went with a cheap hosting provider in the US – ZZHosting. I liked the name. It reminded me of those bearded Texans, ZZ Top.  Ironically, the drummer Frank Beard was the only one in the band that didn’t sport one.

Back to the point, ZZ Hosting offers all the scary stuff that your host must provide, like PHP and MySQL. It also offers Joomla! pre-installed (part of the Fantastico list of software). You install Joomla! at a click of a button with Fantastico. Creating a site takes ages, so you might as well save time at the start (well, that’s my theory). But Fantastico has its critics and it’s worth reading-up about it. 

ZZ Hosting’s uptime has been excellent – not that we’re doing anything particularly "mission critical".

A quick review: Beginning Joomla! From Novice To Professional by Rahmel

I got hold of Beginning Joomla!: From Novice To Professional by Dan Rahmel. The reviews on Amazon.co.ukare pretty bad – just 2.5 stars out of 5. Reviews on the US site,  Amazon.com, are a lot better (4.5 out of 5). But the book rightly tops the chart of best selling Joomla! books on both sites.

A criticism of the book was that the chapter on Setting up a Joomla! site in 20 minutes focuses mainly on hosting it using GoDaddy, a large US provider. But if you use a host which offers Fantastico (such as ZZ Hosting) you can skip all this.

Half the battle with any CMS is understanding its organisation. In the case of Joomla! you need to get your head around things like ‘categories’, ‘sections’ and ‘modules’. This is an area where Rahmel really excels. He advises the reader to plan the various sections of your site before uploading any content. In some respects you are being forced to put the proverbial ‘cart’ before the ‘horse’ – but the guy is certainly right. Uploading content is pretty easy when you’ve got the basics in place.   

I was less impressed with the chapter on creating your own template. It’s a lovely idea, but the explanations made zero sense to me. This was really something for the professional end of the readership. You could write a whole book on creating your own templates – I wish someone would!

Even if you take the time to create a template from scratch using Rahmel’s methods, I have a feeling the results would still not be as good as if you spent five minutes downloading one of the numerous free template available at Joomla24 (easily the best Joomla! template site). Call me lazy, but you can customise the free templates to get them looking how you want.

The version of Joomla! you download is pretty basic. You can really improve it’s functionality and make your own life easier as an administrator by ‘pimping your ride’ with some extensions. In fact I would make it compulsory to download them early on – some are pretty essential.

Extensions come in a number of different flavors – ‘components’, ‘modules’ and ‘plug-ins’ and Rahmel provides a good explanation here. He recommends a few decent ones, but I didn’t bother with them. I just read a load of the reviews on the excellent Joomla! Extensions directory and took my pick. I will write a post about the extensions I’ve personally enjoyed very shortly.

All in all, Rahmel provides a good beginners guide to the CMS. He has a companion site (created using Joomla!, of course) at Joomla! JumpStart. Within an hour of sitting down with the book, it all starts to look a lot more user-friendly.

Creating a news site using WordPress (yep! – that’s the blogging tool)

Something different. Andy Dickinson has written a fantastic post about creating a similar thing to what I’m doing using WordPress. I thought that WordPress was just a humble bit of blogging software, but it turns out you can create a good looking news site as well. The results are impressive. WordPress is certainly far more user-friendly than Joomla!