Blog
Some occassional technical ramblings centred around my use of Joomla! and css/html/javascript with things I learn (mainly from others) along the journey.
I started building small websites around 2007 using MS FrontPage and table designs in html - complex, inflexible, dreadful. I have been a Joomla! user since around 2009 with Joomla! 1.5. What a journey since then and what a lot I have learned!
Website design, build and support is a part-time role for me having retired from full time work in 2007. Although my focus is small businesses, volunteer and community groups (and I am part-time) I non the less bring 26 years of previous experience to bear, from IT in small to large organisations, in what I do and how I work with my customers.
Joomla! 4 and templates
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- Written by: Steve Gibbon
I have come to really like Joomla! 4 over the last few months of trials and have got quite comfortable with the interface. Great job everyone.
Extension providers for all of the extensions I use have largely been well prepared or ready by the recommended live Joomla! 4 version. Again great job.
There is one catch however. My experiements with Joomla! 4 have been largely to start from scratch with the Cassiopeia template and retro fit my sites (CSS, content etc) to the new template. This has pros and cons. The pros are that this has been a great opportunity to review my site, remove 'waste' sometimes built up since version 1.5 (all those years ago) and generally improve everything along the way, knowing the site will be in good shape for a few years to come.
The cons are that most of my sites are buitl on one time templates or modified versions of earlier templates in Joomla! releases. See the Joomla Document pages for a great discussion on template compatibility. You will see from the link that advice on Joomla 3 to 4 template conversion is absent. With 20+ Sites of varying sizes to build I now have a daunting taks of converting all of my site templates to something based on Cassiopeia.
Sadly my research into Joomla! 4 did not pick up on this issue early enough (my fault) and I now need to work on a solution which is streamlined enough to be efficient but also to ensure longevity of my templates for the foreseeable future.
Joomla! - Migrating to Version 4
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- Written by: Steve Gibbon
I have been a Joomla User since version 1.5 back in 2008. I remember some pain migrating from Joomla! v1.x to Joomla! v2.x. I don't remember much pain at v2.x to 3.x. Things seemed to be much smoother in those later versions.
No migration can be assumed to run 100% perfectly, and v3.x to v4. welcomes a lot of change, structural as well as functional, so best to be prepared I thought. A while back (perhaps 6 weeks) I therefore dedicated some of my Sunday recreational (!) time to looking at what V4 might bring. Hey, I can't go sailing at the moment so I needed a 'fun' way to spend some of my spare time!
Joomla - a Journey from 1.5 to 4.0.0-Beta7
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- Written by: Steve Gibbon
Updated 30/8/24 with reference at the bottom of the article to the Down or Not website monitoring tool.
I have been using the Joomla! Cotent Management System (CMS) since 2009 and the initial version 1.5 (launched 2008). Back then the Internet was still maturing (it still is?) and I actually bought a paper book on Joomla! 1.5 to help me. I still have that book! Back then we had table designs in html layout but I dropped that quite quickly following inspiration from Dan Cederholm, Jeffrey Zeldman, Ethan Marcotte, Jeremy Keith and many many others along the way. I devoured technical books, including all of the previously listed authors, like I never had in the previous 26 years, and read whatever I could find on the Internet. I developed (renewed?) a thirst for knowledge and improvement.