Posted by rkwickstrom on 12/04/07 16:57

On Nov 30, 11:29 am, The Natural Philosopher <a...@b.c> wrote:
> Tim Streater wrote:
> > In article <1196439391.2479...@proxy02.news.clara.net>,
> > The Natural Philosopher <a...@b.c> wrote:
>
> >> Tim Streater wrote:
> >>> In article <1196424926.5572...@iris.uk.clara.net>,
> >>> The Natural Philosopher <a...@b.c> wrote:
>
> >>>> WTF is it?
>
> >>>> like most of these wonder tools, you find the site, and it tells you
> >>>> lots of stuff that you don't need, but the main questions:-
>
> >>>> what is it?
> >>>> where does it fit on my server? (debian/apache2/php5/mysql) etc.
> >>>> why should I want to use it?
>
> >>>> go unanswered...;-)
>
> >>>> Its Friday. Free for all discussion. Any input on what its good for,
> >>>> where its broken, how to integrate it with an existing website etc welcome.
>
> >>>> I know so little, I don't even know what questions to ask ;-)
> >>> A Content Management System (CMS) allows you to create a website with a
> >>> certain style/look to it, without you needing to know anything about
> >>> html (or PHP).
>
> >>> Typically, you use the CMS via a browser, in fact. Suppose you are a
> >>> franchising outfit. You might want your franchisees to all have websites
> >>> that look very similar; so you provide a CMS to them all. So,
> >>> frinstance, the CMS might have a popup where you enter your location. It
> >>> will then build a frame of the home page for the target website
> >>> incorporating some text like "The WIdget Co Outlet in <location>" with
> >>> some graphics. You might then have another popup where you can create
> >>> sections for your website, with some content in each that you specify.
> >>> As you create each, you can from time to time click on (say) "create
> >>> website" and go look at what you've built so far. And so on.
>
> >>> Ebay has a built-in mini-CMS for when you are selling stuff. You input
> >>> all the crap like photos of the object and text about it, and it then
> >>> lets you preview how your item-for-sale will look when you actually
> >>> click "Sell".
>
> >> Right. So given all th data I want to display is in a prexexistent
> >> database, (MYsql) it ain't a deal of good to me really?
>
> > Doesn't sound like it.
>
> >> I wanted something top do screen design fast, grabbing data via PHP
> >> commands where necessary for drop down menus etc etc.
>
> > I just spent several days writing a bunch of PHP/mysql driven web pages
> > (87 files, in fact) letting me create/edit/delete/search for entities
> > that sit in 6 mysql tables. Some of the tables have rows that have
> > many-to-many relationships with rows in other tables or within the same
> > table. So there were some complexities.
>
> > It'd be interesting to know if there are tools to make such pages
> > quickly.
>
> I may look at the spouses Dreamweaver..to do the 'pretties' - that does
> HTML/javascript but you can add PHP into it.Careful grouping of most of
> the PHP into a separate included file so that its at its minimum in the
> HTML page might be a way to segregate 'form' from 'function', as it
> were ;-)

Maybe a new perspective will frame this topic in a more understandable
light...

Your original question was "What is Joomla?"

My answer is this:

Joomla, like many other CMS programs (Content Management System) is a
program that allows you to place all of the individual pages or
segments/stories of your web site into a database and retrieve them on
demand, wrapping them in the necessary XHTML to display it in the
visitor's web browser.

It builds all of the navigation, and other tools required to
completely support Blogging, personal web sites, and with extensions
it supports ecommerce, calendar functions and many other things.

The point that it seems that you missed in the earlier discussion is
that the web pages are pulled out of the database and constructed on
the fly using a template for the XHTML and CSS to make it quite easy
to use and maintain.

Hope this helps,

--Russ Wickstrom

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