I’ve been busily digging into Joomla to create a new business site over at www.davefeasey.com. I was complaining that the code was a mess and that I wish it were more object oriented. Then of course I became aware of the Joomla 1.5 effort, which looks very OOP and sophisticated. 1.5 is currently in Beta, and the code freeze started today.

Part of the reason for this is that I’m looking for work again, although I’m still on contract at Kodak. Unfortunately, they just announced further layoffs this year, so I’m not too optimistic about getting hired or extended. The prospect of doing a full redesign, plus content was too much for me, so I took the plunge with Joomla. Having revised the templates there to match (more or less) the style I was looking for, I’m now thinking I ought to try the same experiment here at Greener Minds. I was noticing that the Joomla developers actually used WordPress for one of their documentation sites- Not Good! I personally wholly subscribe to the ‘Eat your own dogfood’ Dogbowl Philosophy I first heard about over at Zope.

No, not the Safari browser.

A safari to figure out how to edit the theme. Already you can see that I’ve changed the color of the Annoying Million Pixel Deep Gradient Header Thingy and that my copy is black, not gray.

Did that on my lunch break so it seems pretty straightforward. However, if I try to make the AMPDGHT only 72px, it slides up, and the text of my name (also annoying) stays where it is. The style.css file in the theme has about 2000 lines and a lot of duplication, commenting, etc. Guess I’ll have to become a CSS guru on top of all my other jobs.

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Got Emergence by Steven Johnson out of the library, along with an O’Reily book on PHP. So’s I can edit the theme. It’s all circular, see?

I’m pretty fed up with work so I’m looking for new. My dream job is still creating knowledge systems using rich media, especially around sustainability, systems and permaculture. Y suggested that I stay here and work toward that, start moving to something more heart-centered for me. If you want to know about my current job, see some of the movies on the list below.

So, I installed WordPress and I quickly discovered the first annoyance. I’m used to the Manila model, where you type double quotes around your link in the body of the post, it does a lookup in your list of links, posts, named images, etc. and creates the anchor tag and points it to the right URL. Still trying to find how this is done in WordPress. I’m also wondering if it uses Wiki conventions- I’ll try that next.