Compass Designs

If you have been around at Compass Designs recently, you will have noticed I have done a redesign. I was using the WordPress component for my blog. I was finding it very difficult to use, so I set myself the goal of trying to set up a blog using just the default features of Joomla and the minimum number of components.

If you have been around at Compass Designs recently, you will have noticed I have done a redesign. I was using the WordPress component for my blog. I was finding it very difficult to use, its basically WordPress running inside Joomla which was clunky. It was difficult to style, I had to hack alot of the CSS and the last straw was the URL's did not work with my SEF component of choice, OpenSEF. So I set myself the goal of trying to set up a blog using just the default features of Joomla and the minimum number of components.

For me there were 9 key things I wanted from my blog:

• Flexible layout
• Search Engine Optimized Titles
• A robust and good looking comment system
• Tags, like Digg, Del.icio.us etc
• A solid RSS which could service categories
• Ability to have an RSS feed be automatically emailed to people
• Categories in Sidebar
• "Chicklets"
• Trackbacks and Pings

Let's see how I did with each of these:

• Flexible layout
  This is where Joomla simply beats WordPress into the ground.. and then jumps up on down on it. Trying to style a WP template within a Joomla template was painful, and I make templates for a living! The process involved searching through WP stylesheets and php files to try and resolve conflicts. By comparision, in Joomla, I could just have the content presented as a "blog" and could style it elagently and easily.
• Search Engine Optimized Titles
  Having good titles (and I mean meta <titleOpenSEF. Its new Ajax admin interface is great and it seems to produce robust URL's. The clincer is the ease in which you can create redirects. I was using SEF Advance, which was causing me all kinds of problems. Swicthing solutions meant I had a lot of URL's that need to change, links from other sites. All I have to do is monitor my logs and when I see traffic coming in from old URL's its a 3 second (literally) job to set up a redirect to the new URL. No messing with htaccess here.
  The second part of the process was internal links. These are useful for SEO, but who wants to be found on a Google search for "read more". There is a mambot from Run Digital that changes that though, and makes the link much better, I am using it on the blog.
• A robust and good looking comment system
  Previously I have been using AkoComment. I wasn't good. The developer Arthur Konze does not support Joomla and the captcha (the characters you have to enter to post) wasn't working well. There were a couple of mods available for Joomla, but I still felt it was all pretty clumsy.
  Luckily, at the time of revising how I was building my blog, a new Joomla comment component, JomComment was released. I am using it on my site now and its great. The front end looks good, has a robust captcha and is easy to template. Its also got some nice extra features like hiding the comment form with Ajax.
• Tags, like Digg, Del.icio.us etc
  One of the things about fijiwebdesign.com. One of the even better things about Joomla is the nature of the developer community. When I installed the bot, it was placing tags in the side column, which made a mess. I emailed the developer and he fixed it within about 48 hours. Remember, its a free extension.
• A solid RSS which could service categories
  The default RSS feed in Run Digital has a component that allows you to have an RSS feed from anywhere. This allowed me to provide a feed for each of my categories in my blog. So if you are a site focussing on SEO, you can get the feed for just that section.
  I took a second step of passing my main feed into Feedburner. I did this for usability as it provides a much better interface to get a feed to the whole blog if you want it. I also get the little icon that shows me how many readers I have.
• Ability to have an RSS feed be automatically emailed to people
  As with using Feedburner, sometimes its not the best solution to use here, sign up and try it out :)
• Categories in Sidebar
  This was simple enough. I just had to create a menu and module with all the blog catergories in it.
• "Chicklets"
  Chicklets are little icons that allow you to subscribe to an RSS feed using your reader of choice, Yahoo, Google etc. Using Feedburner meant that it automatically created all these for me, I just had to copy and paste the code into a module. You can see them on the blog.
• Trackbacks and Pings
  So last is the bad news. There currently is not any solution to this that I have found. Having these blogging tools would be nice. WP had them. In the author's opinion however, these two are nowhere near enough to outweigh all the other disadvantages of WP and the advantages of Joomla.

The summary?

Wordpress is a blogging tool, its really good at it. Try and customize it or get it do do more and the curve gets very hard very quick. Joomla by comparison is a full blown CMS that can blog if you want it to easily. There are some minor features missing, but you make this up and more with all the powerful features of a mature CMS you can leverage into your blog. Forums anyone?