ian haya

So I’ve managed to jump on a Joomla! project in the local community on a volunteer basis as part of a website redesign for the Ottawa Talent Initiative, an organization that I’ve joined to help me in my current job search. As I mentioned before, I’ve built a lot of bad websites in my day, so here’s a chance to be part of a team that might actually make a nice one.

What exactly is Joomla!? Joomla! is a content management system for building websites and developing online applications. It’s open source, fully extendable, and has a lot of people out there using it. This means there’s a lot of fully functional extensions already written that you can just download, install, activate, and see on your page in minutes.

When I first joined up on the project, I was hoping to brush up on some of my php and MySQL skills, getting right in and doing some coding. After playing around with Joomla!, it looks like the power of the extensions makes a lot of that unnecessary. It’s going to be much more of an exercise in the software development process. Coding afterall, is just one piece of the puzzle, an ends to a mean, a set of instructions to get something to do what you want it to do.