Some of you that have bookmarked a page or an RSS feed may have noticed that some things are being moved around so let me explain what's going on for now.
Search Engine Friendly
I've been wanting more Search Engine Friendly URLs. Here's an example. The first url is the replacement for the second - much nicer eh?
- http://www.grantmcwilliams.com/tech/programming/php
- http://grantmcwilliamso.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=category§ionid=9&id=68&Itemid=330
Not only that but I've been wanting much nicer blogging so I can have articles appear to be in more than one category without more work for me. For instance if I have an article that talks about Qemu and Xen I want it in both categories so people watching my RSS feed on Qemu will get articles that may have been under the Xen category before. Ideally someone could subscribe to a Virtualization RSS feed and get all posts in all Virtualization categories, ie. Xen, KVM, Vbox and Qemu. The problem is that Joomla! has a very limiting category system that only has two levels (Section and category) and an article can only belong to one category in one section. Dedicated blogging software like Wordpress handles this fine but doesn't integrate very well with Joomla! although I used it for about a year in the past. There is very little in the way of Joomla! blogging components but one looked very promising - MyBlog. It's a commercial component for about $45 that makes very nice looking blog posts, has RSS feeds and has tags so I can have an article be in many categories. However, it's mission statement reads something like this - "want to have all the positives and negatives of Wordpress in a Joomla! component". If I have a list of howtos then I have to keep them in the Joomla! category system in order to do a category list and tags don't work or I let MyBlog handle them but I can't have a category list at all and the format is very different.
If there's one complaint I have with Joomla! sites it's lack of consistancy. You'll see an article with all kinds of random urls and blocks of icons at the bottom which seem to change depending on where you are on the site. I want to avoid this if possible.
What Joomla Blogging should be like
I want this site to be so simple to navigate and use that anyone can use it. That means that the header of an article should have the
- Title
- poster (usually me),
- date
- tags
- gravitar (although not that important)
It should also give the option to
- make pdf
- Subscribe to RSS feed
The last thing is the footer of the article should have
- Read More button
- Comment link
- Social Bookmarking link.
I may be going down a track that I hadn't intended but all of the code for what I want is available now but it's not integrated so I'm thinking that if I took what was there, put it together into a unified project and made it work than we'd have a really good free blogging component.Following is my current list of what I'm playing with.
- Bookmarks
- JooTag
- Akocomment (or similar)
- gravitar
- JT Auto ping
If all of this code was wrapped up in one package I'd have just about everything I want in one component. I've been looking at the code for JooTag and I think it should be the starting point. It already has tagging buttons for the editor and will list tags under the article header. I need to add a nicer CSS to it, fix some linking bugs, make sure it works with the standard RSS feed links, and get it to either work with my JomComment or integrate a comment component into it. I don't think the gravitar support will be that hard and the Bookmarks module will be easy to merge into the JooTag footer.
Anyway so there's a lot of work going on here and I don't have a lot of time. If I don't get it done I may just deal with standard Joomla! categories because it's easy to roll things over to a tagging system later.