I complained Friday that Joomla is not well equipped to handle all the features required for a blog. So, I worked over the weekend on installing and customizing wordpress on our server. I completed 80% of the customization work. But anyone who worked in software will tell you that the last 20% of any project take 80% of the time.

This blog page is running on wordpress. I am still working through the list of glitches trying to make Joomla and Wordpress templates look similar to each other. If you notice a problem with the blog, I would appreciate a quick comment on this blog.

Tags: Joomla
Posted in Blogging, Business, Technology

The response to our $400 give away in RSS contest has been great. I am happy to see that many bloggers linked to the contest over the last few days. However, the biggest complaint that I keep hearing about is the issue with our partial RSS feed. People hate partial RSS feeds. I even noticed that some will subscribe to our feed but when they discover the feed is partial, they unsubscribe.

Truth be told, I hate our partial feed myself! I wish I can find a way to provide a full feed. See, our site is built using Joomla CMS. And while Joomla is great for content management, it was not built with blogging in mind. So, here are the main limitations of Joomla when it comes to blogging:

1. The core RSS functionality in Joomla is strictly provided for the front page of the site. Since our blog is not on the front page, there is no built in syndication for the blog. This stinks!
2. No track back functionality: There are no modules that I know of that provide that functionality.
3. No pinging functionality: There are modules that claim to provide ping functionality but I am yet to see one that works well.
4. No core comment functionality: There are modules that provide this functionality. But because these modules are not core to Joomla, you can not display the number of comments per item on the main blog. A reader must click on the item to view the number of comments on it.
5. No tagging functionality: I guess you can always tag blogs by hand. But if you use a WYSIWYG editor inside Joomla, the editor will strip out the “rel tag.”

Of course the biggest pain point is the first one where there is no way to syndicate content that is not on the main page. There are two modules that provide a solution to this particular problem. The one we are using for our site will only provide partial feed functionality. I am yet to be able to get the other module that claims to syndicate non-front page content to work.

So, here I am stuck with a partial feed and trying to figure a way out of this whole mess. I am leaning towards using Wordpress for our blog. Of course that in itself will be a headache because we will have to integrate two different platforms (Joomla & WP). The biggest problem is making the blog look like the rest of the site. Sounds like I have a long weekend ahead of me! So tell me:

• How do you feel if the blog looked different than the rest of the site?
• Do you recommend a place where we can purchase our word press theme?

Tags: Joomla, RSS-feed, wordperss
Posted in Blogging, Technology