I’ve been arsing around creating colourful content on the internet for years now, and I’m not going to stop any time soon. I remember the first site I created for a reason which I must have made around eight or nine years ago, back when I had ISDN through Clara.net. It was a site for a Half-Life team and I pieced it together with Notepad, Paint Shop Pro 3 and liberal overuse of <frame> tags. I think you can still find it on the Wayback Machine, I might have a dig around later and see if there is still a copy somewhere. In the last few years I’ve been paying for my own half-decent hosting so I can make use of MySQL, php and the like, and more importantly using some of the brilliant free-to-use packages for creating web content.
You name it, I’ve downloaded and used it. PHPNuke, Postnuke, PHPBB, Goldmine, WordPress, Movable Type, Drupal, XOOPS, Mambo (now Joomla), SMF, Website Baker – I could go on (but won’t). The only ones I’ve really stuck with are PHPBB (with the MX portal front-end), WordPress (you’re looking at it now) and SMF (with Tiny Portal front-end). I’ve used Joomla a lot in the past making sites for myself and others, and I’m resurrecting it with a fresh install after a break of a couple of years and a few versions. Our martial arts club is getting bigger and introducing new classes, and with the old site (which I made with Website Baker) being at least a couple years old now – practically antique! – I’m having a look at creating a central site which can handle all of the different classes, clubs, locations and importantly, the students and teachers.
It’s no small feat building a site to accommodate everyone and everything, as I’ve found out the hard way more than once. I’m leaving the install completely clean and empty for now and building a comprehensive list of everything it’ll need, so I can make sure those modules and components are installed from the outset. I’ve found some things – for example the community builder component – add features and options which leave holes in users’ profiles if it’s installed later. Tarting up is definitely lowest on the list of priorities, themes can be shoe-horned and altered to fit as necessary, it’s getting the content organised that’s the hard part. Some people would probably think using a pre-packaged CMS (Content Management System) is a lazy way of creating a site, and in a way I guess they’re right, but in order to build a framework even remotely as useful and integrated the average person would need a lot of time and skill available.
I’m also deadly keen on this new theme (pixeled) so I’m sticking with it for now, just a little bit of template editing needed to smarten it up to how I’d like it :).