Mac Musings

Low End Mac Needs Help Moving to Joomla

Daniel Knight - 2008.10.08 -

We've needed to move Low End Mac to a content management system (CMS) for years, and thanks to suggestions from many readers, we've settled on Joomla as the CMS that appears to best meet our needs.

Joomla will let us cut and paste the HTML from existing articles, which is a hugely important feature for a website with over 6,000 articles - and it will let our writers submit columns online using a WYSIWYG editor. It will let us categorize content as profiles, news, and editorial content. It will let us add reader comments at the end our our articles. Best of all, it will let our staff publish new content when I go on vacation.

Looking ahead, we'll be able to set up forums for Low End Mac users and perhaps replace the LEM Swap list with something more like eBay and/or Craigslist.

I'm excited by the possibilties. Joomla has neat features like letting you set the font size bigger or smaller, its own search function, and is always being expanded with add-on modules.

Joomla is a very powerful, very popular CMS that separates content from design - and that's where I'm running stuck. Low End Mac already uses CSS-based design, and I'm kind of floundering as I try to develop a Joomla template for LEM.

We're not looking to make any big changes to our design at this point. We'd like to pretty much duplicate the tried-and-true design we developed years ago while we get used to Joomla, and after that we'll be ready to look at updating our design.

If you're a Joomla user and would like to help us out with this, please join lem-joomla on Google Groups.

And thanks a million!