My Big Summer Project

No, I’m not planning to become the principal ballerina for the Australian Ballet. I don’t even plan to tower over this project with commanding power and grace. But I do hope to learn a bit about 3 platforms that are new to me:

Joomla

There’s love & hate for Joomla all over the web, just like WordPress or Drupal. The love version goes something like

Most of the power of Drupal, with most of the ease of WordPress

I’ve never tried Drupal, but just getting started with Joomla I can quickly see that it breaks things down a lot! Way more options. And way more complex / confusing. Will I get used to it? Time will tell!

Jekyll

Is one of many Static or Flat web platforms.

Curious thing, all (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal) of the major PHP-based CMS don’t have native markdown support. But it seems like all of the static platforms do. These guys love markdown!

Jekyll is fast, clean, simple, and secure.

Muse

so Joomla is is more complex than WordPress, and Jekyll is simpler. but to some degree some degree they are all similar. Adobe Muse seems different. IDK yet how you’d even do something like a blog, but for laying out content, it seems like the most flexible and versatile. At least to someone who doesn’t write Javascript or CSS like me. At least one Adobe evangelist calls it InDesign for the Web.

I guess the ID reference is promising if you do want to do things like blogs. But in my 1st 5 minutes, it seems like Illustrator for the Web. Very promising for creative layouts and art projects.

frontends compared a page of Jekyll in a window next to a page of Joomla Jekyll Minima theme on the left, Joomla Responsive Portfolio template on the right. Different themes/templates offer completely different Frontend Experiences, but really, that’s all about CSS, and perhaps Javascript, and not so much about Jekyll or Joomla, WordPress or Ghost. (open image in new tab to see larger and compare)

CSS & MySQL

When I put my first page up with the Jekyll default them I was in awe of its simplicity and elegance.

Then I put this 1st Joomla page up with this Responsive Joomla Portfolio Template and it looked even better. Possibly getting almost too spare, but so clean, reader friendly, and especially on my tablet, glorious.

What I’m admiring is pretty much CSS. It’s fairly simple type design. I just happen to like one styling better than another, and wow I’ve seen so many bad stylings on WordPress, Ghost or any other platform.

It’s a reminder that I really don’t know CSS at all, and I really should. I’ve also been aware that I really don’t know MySQL at all, and I should know that too.

I could add them to this summer list, but that might be too many items, and summer goes by fast. Perhaps they are more important than this summer list. I really should have learned them summers ago. But I’m eager to think about Joomla (WordPress alternatives), Jekyll (static / flat websites) & Muse (more creative, graphic, and flexible web design). So I guess I’ll stick to this list. And learn CSS & MySQL somewhere down the road.

Wish me luck!

So there’s the summer ‘17 project: Joomla, Jekyll & Muse. I hope I create some cool things by August. Wish me luck!

This post was originally published on 26 April ‘17 on beacharts.ca/summer, my 1st Joomla site. Now on 31 May ‘17 I’m moving the post here to jekyll.zucman.com which is more of a development & documentation site, so that beacharts.ca/summer can focus on facilitating my summer Art 110 online course.