Saturday, March 22, 2008

So Neat! Now what do I do with it?

Friday afternoon a coworker asked me to setup a server with Joomla!, a Content Management System. I'd never heard of Joomla!, and initially didn't even really know what a Content Management System (CMS) was.

I think a CMS is a system that manages all of the files that comprise a website, so no human needs to keep track of all of that stuff. For example, I may decide I want a specific color for the background, or a certain graphic at the top of every page on the site. Then, instead of having to go add code to every single page, I can just tell the CMS to do it, and it will make it happen. *I Think.* Really, I don't know what a CMS is. But whoever wrote this page seems to understand the concept.

Last night and today I took an old WinXP desktop PC that had 'gone flaky' a while ago, and had spent the last couple of years sitting against a wall in my office, unused. I installed OpenSUSE 10.3 on the machine, including PHP 5.x, Apache 2.2, and MySQL 5.x in the install. At about 10:55pm this evening I finally had Joomla! installed and seeming to be working fine. Of course, I've got no idea what to do with it or how to use it, so I can't really test it too thoroughly. It does seem very neat, though.

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