Our showcase
Canberra User Group Ideas Exchange
Inviting all Canberra Joomla gurus to show their site here and tell us their story. We've all been there and done that with the trials and tribulations of building a Joomla website ... learning all the tricks of the trade. How about you show us your site (or your most memorable if you've built more than one) and tell us a story or two about what you went through. Was there some problem you solved? Some wonderful new thing you learnt? Show and tell us here.
Contact me here to find out how.
Princess Fiona
Co-Convener
Canberra Joomla User Group
I have a keen interest in gardens and gardening in general. Each year I work on growing as much of my own fruit and veg as possible. I am doing this to improve the health of my family as so many pesticides and herbicides are used to grow food. I am also looking to save money at the supermarket as well as getting some exercise. In addition to this I enjoy sharing the food I grow with friends. I am of the mind that we can all make a huge difference to our own health and that of our planet by doing even a small amount of gardening. The ozgardener website is a way of sharing information with people with the hope of encouraging others to get involved in gardening. It took me many months of work as I work from home and fit this in around other commitments. The site is specific to the Canberra region but much of the information would be relevant to gardeners wherever they live. I have worked as a teacher, librarian, database administrator and administrator. Creating and managing my own website was something I had wanted to do for a while. Joomla allows me the ability to have complete control over my site and all at minimal cost. I have not found it easy and have pretty much fumbled my way around the system. I really enjoy the challenge of it all and the continual learning that is involved. I have learned the hard way about website security, the importance of backing up work and using a reputable hosting company. I am currently aiming to develop a home based business based on my craft work and am building another Joomla website using Joomla 1.6 to support this endeavour. Wish me luck!
Liz Kennedy
Canberra Joomla User Group
My expertise is in critical thinking, rational argumentation and science, and my passions include, amongst other things, advocacy of individual rights, ethical behaviour and euthanasia, and exposing the hypocrisy of religion and its discrimination and indoctrination.
So, as a content creator (and not a web developer), it seemed logical that I develop a website (at www.ethicalrights.com ) containing all my articles, including The Bibbble (intelligent people would view this as a light satire of standard religious texts). My web guru friends advised I should use Joomla!
And the development of the website was two weeks of hard yakka in January.
First there was the testing using the Joomla! test site. Then the BITNAMI download of Joomla!, finding a webhost, and using fantastico and cpanel on a webserver.
Joomla! ‘Easy’ said my guru friends. Joomla! is easy if you do not want anything other than a very standard template, and you know exactly what your site will look like. What is wonderful about Joomla! is that it is simply extendable, so when your site grows and you need, say a forum, or you want a different style/template, Joomla can accommodate it. Quite excellent really. But if you want to change the header, footer, logo, colour schemes, module positions, etc then be prepared to do plenty of research to modify css and html, and be proficient at graphic design.
Then comes fun with php, Apache, MySQL (and something never quite works as described), ftp, backups of MySQL database and Joomla! files, images, favicons, logos, headers, extensions, RSS, search engine optimisation, and the Joomla! forum (thank you Joomla! community for the answers to many questions) as well as those eureka moments when I discovered my own solutions. I also learnt menu items are as important as the Joomla! websites say they are (there are also some good books out there, and they can save you time). And at the end change your domain to one that does not show your personal details on WHOIS (thanks Ron).
Ethics, Joomla! and caffeine, what a wonderfully potent combination!
David
Canberra Joomla User Group