BC Law IPTF Blog

We’re in the process of transferring our old online journal web site to a new one. We had a number of requirements:

1. We want a system where we could easily post HTML versions of our articles.
2. We want the ability for the public to make comments on each article.
3. We want a blog.
4. We want something that someone not-so-technical could inherit and use. I.e., seamless upgrades, requiring little modification.

And that was about it.

I first thought that Wordpress would be an adequate CMS. But since it’s primarily a blogging tool, articles are posted and archived by the date they’re added by default. It takes a bit of hacking to get a page where the articles have dates other than the posting date and separate from announcements and other posts.

I looked into a Wiki, but the learning/adaptation curve is too steep. I looked at Drupal, but our host dropped it from Fantastico (the auto install tool), and it wasn’t customizable enough. The menu system was too static.

I never took too much of a liking to Joomla–I thought that their effort to find a happy medium between user-friendliness was too half-assed. But then I dug my heels in and started cranking away at understanding it, and I realized that it’s good enough for the job.

I also didn’t want to have multiple user accounts, so I was looking for an all-in-one CMS and blogging tool. But Wordpress is just too good. I also realized that normal users don’t need to access the journal CMS. We only need a few admin accounts to post articles and moderate comments. The bulk of our staff and membership can then get one account for Wordpress–they don’t have to touch Joomla.

It took me a while to find a good, clean template, but I found it. I got rid of most of the content Blocks (the Joomla term), keeping the “topmenu,” the “mainmenu,” and the “othermenu” (just the Administrator Login). No “newsflashes,” no news at all, and got rid of some other stuff.

Joomla creates  Categories and Sections; and I’m not quite clear on why there are two types. But if you create a Category called “Articles,” you also have to create a Section underneath that. This creates two clicks, where we only need one: just click to see articles! But I found that you can create a menu option for a Section, and that bypasses the first step of the hierarchy.

At that point, I realized that Joomla would work. I created Static Content pages for the Contact Us, the About, and the Submission Guidelines. (Joomla has a template for contact information, but I think it’s terrible. I just created our own page as separate Static Content.)

I’m happy with Joomla, when I didn’t think I would be. I like it because it’s Open Source, but also there’s a well-supported community to develop it. Therefore, I think it will be easy to upgrade and (relatively) easy to pass on. The rich text editor is very handy, as long as you’re using an up-to-date browser–it works fine with Firefox 1.5+ on Mac and PC.

So if you’re interested in trying to get your journal online, feel free to contact us and ask about how we got to where we are. Not that we’re the best, but at least it’s functional and practical for the revolving-door staff at a law school journal.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 9th, 2006 at 1:01 am and is filed under Journal, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.