Joomla!

So, what is "Joomla!"? An African form of abuse? A new recreational drug? The chances are pretty good that if you are a regular Internet person you may have come across the term somewhere before.
OK, enough suspense. It's the name of a website Content Management System (CMS). What that means is that you can use this CMS to create your own website without having to know anything at all about writing computer code. The great thing about Joomla! is that it is free and open source. You can download various templates, modules and plug-ins and literally create your own fully-functioning website. For someone like me who is not a technical person and who has very limited knowledge about HTML and all the other web acronyms, it's nothing short of miraculous.
My existing website was put online in 1998, a long time ago in the history of the Internet. Little has been changed on the site since, apart from me uploading new product information and images. In 1998 there was no Joomla!, and without being certain, I suspect that the only way to create a web site in those days was to sit down and physically type in all the code. I paid two young guys about $15,000 to create a site for me, one which we would now call an e-commerce site. It has links to various news items and a shopping basket. The main purpose of the site from my point of view was to allow the increasing number of on line clients of mine to order products from me through the site.
The various databases on the site run from FileMaker Pro, and the scripting language was cobbled together from different sources. Not being a technical person, I knew then - and know now - very little about what this involves. The guys had to create both a front end and a back end, which I could maintain remotely from my home computer. It took some months to get this done. I remember problems getting the site hosted on a stable platform. The site was moved from company to company, which may not have helped, as crashes were pretty common in the first few years.
My lovely wife, who in a previous life was a computer analyst at the Sydney Stock Exchange, has been gently nudging me to create a Joomla! site for some time. She spent a few years, going to college at night, doing a computer course to update her skills. One of the modules she studied was on using Joomla! to create a web site, and since then she has been a big fan. Knowing that I wasn't happy with the way my site looked, and knowing also that we needed some income (!), she made the very good point that I should look into creating my own site using this freely available product. It all made sense to me, but it's taken me some time to finally sit down and do it. This I did two days ago.
What I've managed to do is:

• choose an existing Joomla! template, one which could include a shopping basket.
• download and install the template on my laptop (I wanted to install the site somewhere where it was not online, so that I could play around with it first).
• choose a shopping basket system and install it into the website.

This may not sound like all that much, and you experienced users will be smiling into your Corn Flakes about now, but I have managed to create a fully functioning site, with a functioning shopping basket in 2 days, and it has cost me US$70 (to buy the customized template). I could put this online now and it would work (although it would certainly look clumsy and weird). If I was to do this again, I reckon I could do it in a few hours. This is nothing short of amazing!
I realize full well that I have a long way to go. Now comes the time-consuming part: working out how I want the site to look and function, what goes where, the fiddly stuff which takes 90% of the total time, but the major front end items have been done - the site works!
It would have been much harder without the help from various sources on the Net. If you are looking at installing a Joomla! site, I will gladly give you this wonderful source - go to YouTube and search for Joomla! Template Modification. Find the tutorials by Norm Douglas, who is one of the folks from the Joomla! Forums (and an Aussie). I followed Norm's process to the letter, and it worked. I'm not sure if Norm is a Catholic, but I'd vote for him as our next Pope. You will find various tutorials by Norm on different Joomla! subjects. If you are interested, I would definitely subscribe to all of them. With so much Internet content being plain rubbish, it is a joy to find people like Norm, who are giving up many hours of their time to help dumb arses like me.
Finding such a source is one of those lovely, unexpected moments which can help restore your faith in mankind. Long Live Norm!
And on a related note, a big hello to Patrick, who is now my 2nd follower (and the first one who is not related to me!).