Closed Circle - Foyer

Last Updated on Thursday, 01 October 2009 23:46 Written by Lynn Friday, 26 June 2009 16:10

Living here in central Florida, home to the largest collection of theme parks in the world, I've become familiar with the concept of a "soft opening."

Soft openings are when Disney wants to fine tune the settings on its new roller coaster with real tourists (rather than engineers -- which is why so many people got sick on their Mission to Mars ride...but that's another story).

In other words, soft opening are betas...and that's what Closed Circle is right now: a roller coaster waiting for its first paying customers.

I'm pretty sure it's not going to kill you, but I'm not really expecting it to work the way it's supposed to, either.

So, why has it taken so long to get to a mere beta?  I've put together quite a few old-fashioned websites using a program called NetObjects Fusion..  I'm most proud of the PHS Alumni Website I put together for my dad, but my dad's only 10 miles away.  When something goes wrong, it's easy for us to get together to fix it--because, really, only one of us can be working on a Fusion  site at the same time.

That wasn't going to work for Closed Circle, not with Jane and CJ up in Washington State and me in Florida.  I had to figure out how to mount a website to which we could all safely add content.  My choices narrowed down to Drupal and Joomla!  In the end, I chose Joomla! because it seemed to have a larger and more active developer community.

I don't regret the choice.  Joomla! can do exactly what I want it to do, once I figure out how to use it.

I've been programming computers since punch cards and COBOL back in the early 70s.  One concept has remained the same: we love standards; that's why we have so many of them.  We've got php, html, css, xml, xhtml.  And what's legit in one, ain't legit in another.  I got a book on Joomla! (several, in fact -- authors love books) and I'd never have made it this far without them.  But the copy-editting!  When a copyeditor swaps a colon for a semi-colon in one of my stories, that's an annoyance.  When it happens in a book from which I'm trying to figure out how to format a Joomla! CSS file, it's a twenty-four-hour disaster.

Joomla! has made me feel both old and stupid many times in the last few months and I know it's going to do it to me again.  But, to the very limited extent that Joomla! is like COBOL (my "native" programming language, or at least my first one) it does appear that things get easier once you can actually see output.

I know that CJ and Jane are eager to add content -- which Joomla! will allow them to do even while I'm working through the soft-opening kinks.

So, by all means, make yourselves at home, kick the tires (gently, please!), and let me know what doesn't work (clearly, I need all the help I can get ;-) )

Lynn

(lynn at lynnabbey-dot-com )