Posted by The Natural Philosopher on 12/04/07 17:06

rkwickstrom wrote:
> 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
>

In fact, that answer would have saved me a couple of days of searching
to arrive at, and thanks for it.

But the answer ended up being 'well that's not actually what I was
looking for' :-)

I was more after a WYSIWYG tool that understood embedded php and
Javascript to access a pre-existent database and generate stuff from it..

I will probably use something like Dreamweaver..

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