Musings

Over the weekend, started to spec out the port to Mambo, but now the CMS game is back up for grabs.

When the news broke last year about the split in the Mambo project, I figured things would settle down and a reunification like what is happening with Debian would take place.

It looks like that isn't the case though, which makes the whole move from static pages to a CMS a bit murkier in the coming days (I'm beyond pressed for time, so I'll block out one weekend to do the whole port and won't want to have to come back to it).

Since I'm clearly going with an open-source platform for cost savings, what it comes down to now is:

Mambo
Drupal
Joomla

My bias is developing around these points:

Joomla +: Joomla is the variant of the Mambo split; essentially the entire development team left and started Joomla. (In programming, I'm typically always a fan of the core dev team over the bu.)
Mambo +: Mambo has been around for 5 years and so has stable builds of the modules I would implement.
Joomla +: Mambo has sold out to Ansearch, furthering my support of the dev group.
Drupal +: A year of stable development behind them and has developed a fairly robust community.

Two months ago and prior I would have made the move to Mambo, but with the selling out to Ansearch and the departure of the second head developer, Mambo is pretty much out of the running.

The top choice now is Drupal, but Joomla is making a major release with 1.50. It was slated for release last month, but is still pending.

So I figure, I'll hold off until the 1.50 release then get a guage of which direction to go.

General indicators that Joomla seems to be overtaking Mambo:



The Google Trends indicator will suffer distortion from the high cross correlation of the term "Mambo".



Blue: Joomla || Red: Mambo || Yellow: Drupal

So, this is my first foray into using Blogger to publish onto my website. I have in-template CSS going on and i'm in the process of making the CSS a seperate sheet.

The concept of cascading CSS is much like inheritance so i'm intrigued, but at the same time i'm wondering what the limitations are.

for instance, currently i'm trying to get back up to snuff and run 5-6 blogs. I'm having a ridiculous time porting them from word press since i think i've lost all my archives in the process of unloading wordpress from my web server! Yeah, tell me about it.

Well, as i re-incorporate new blogs and links into the site, i'm hoping that there is one place i can make the changes so i don't have to the tedious process of going into each blogger blog and changing the template side-bar

fields manually.

Back to my original CSS point. I'm wondering if i can incorporte the actual menu itself into the CSS sheet so that it "cascades" down to all the pages with one change. I'm thinking though that i might have to incorporate instead into the basic blogger blog template a redirect to maybe a txt file or seperate html file that will act as the menu source, like tables of old? I dunno, my HTML was never stellar, as any comp time i had for coding was for class assignments (C++ or Java); it's weird you'd think they'd make web-dev part of the curriculum.

Debating now whether to go with Flash or html/php/xml for my website update. Spent President's day weekend reading over some of the literature that's out there and I definitely feel like a dinosaur.

Got a lot of catching up to do, but it seems that most of the new dev concepts out there are building on basic object oriented theory.

Inheritance, virtual classes, the whole gammot of good old O-O basics. Although some of the implementation reminds me of C++. Case in point CSS. The style sheets are a great extension of the HTML language, but some of the cases of type definition and class inheritance especially relative to multiple inheritance are a bit convoluted, reminding me of when o-o was first implemented for C++, a o-o implementation within a procedural framework. Of course the flexibility, stability and robust libraries made it a mainstay in most programming applications. The same I think will be true of HTML and CSS.

Well, it's late, and i'm not really thinking too lucidly, but needed a first post to get the index for this page up.