Bruce Whealton: On Being a Poet and Other Existential Ideas

Archive for the ‘Future Wave Designs’ Category

I wanted to highlight and describe the things I’ve done with Word Salad Online, over the years, especially most recently. In my previous posting here, I mention that I recently installed and setup the Community Builder software which is an extension for Joomla – the software that is used to create Word Salad Online. Joomla is a Content Management System, a dynamic, database-driven application. We contrast that with static websites. In a static website, which is how I did websites years ago, I’d have to recreate Word Salad with each issue that we publish. I’d have to create a new website, 4 times per year, because we publish 4 times per year. Sure, it might look very similar in design but each issue is an entirely new website creation and publication.

With Joomla, I created one website years ago. The content, the articles, the poems, the images, everything, is stored in a database (actually a reference to the image is stored in the database). In a static website, it’s easy to lose content, or lose track of where it is. It is rather cumbersome to have 4 different websites with images and other design elements for each publication that comes out – again, this happens 4 times per year. Joomla makes this so much easier. The poems, the images, the design elements, are kept in one place, in one location. The software organizes this complexity quite well. When we come out with a new edition of the magazine, we just change the menu to display the links to the new set of poems that are part of the new edition, as it is released.

The overall look and feel, of the site in Joomla is controlled by Templates. This helps to create a very consistent look to the entire site. In the next article/posting, I’ll talk about how the templates are created and then move on to talk about Community Builder software.

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