Jonathan Hobson wrote:
I will be at the next meeting without a doubt so you can see me in the
flesh but meanwhile - I am an enterprise based programmer and
designer, you can find me in quite a few books/magazines, i have won
alot of awards and my work also involves being a full database/server
administrator.
A useful addition to the group then!
I work for quite a few big clients such as E.ON, Adaptec, Intel,
nCipher, WWF and quite a few smaller companies from sole-traders to
anyone who needs help - size matters not to me, everyone is important!
I know that feeling; we likewise have some big names and some sole
traders (and home users).
I am cross-platform, working on both Linux [i.e. RedHat/Fedora/CentOS]
and Windows[i..e. NT/2000/2003] and I speak many languages/frameworks
from PHP to ASP, ASP.NET to RUBY, C# to VB, CSS to AJAX, XML to WAP,
LINGO to ACTIONSCRIPT etc ...
Good mixture there too, I'm sure a few of them will be called on here!
You might regret making it known :-)
I've been doing the above for quite a long time and without wanting to
sound like an advertisement - i will quickly say that helping you guys
would be a pleasure :-)
Obviously appreciated! You're not alone here - we have several people
from each end of the scale and right across it here.
Being honest it would be true to say i have little experience of Mambo
or Joomla - i generally work with the raw operating system itself - so
I don't see a possible 'software learning curve' as an issue at all;
but would it not be true to say that both Mambo and Joomla are merely
GUI management systems and neither software solution suggests the
servers ability to host PHP/RUBY or MySQL/Postgre to enable a forum?
Joomla is PHP/MySQL based, and the server its hosted on (managed by
lug.org.uk) is pretty capable in general.
Joomla is one of those things: it is very good at what it does but you
have to work it's way or else it all goes wrong! Probably worth giving
you a quick overview at the next meeting before letting you lose on it.
Like you (by the sound of it) I'm generally happier at the commandline
hacking code but Joomla makes it easier to open the site up to "normal"
people, ans in any case we won't be allowing lots of people SSH access
(as its not our server) so putting that layer of code on top makes it
possible for lots of people to contribute.
I have no idea who supplies the server and if there are any costs
involved but if the server does not support these items then has the
group ever considered moving to a VPS server and using
cPanel/fantastico or similar which would be far superior and easier to
use???
There's nothing in particular that a VPS could do (that we need!) that
we can't do already, but a lot of us here have quite a lot of experience
of those types of environment.
Regarding a forum - if the server supported it: I would suggest that
the easiest option would be to install a copy of PHPBB or similar
which would be nice 'n' quick and would do the job perfectly but
whatever the group decides as a whole the website should be
attractive/accessible and friendly - especially by trying to show that
the Linux desktop does not require a 'degree in computing' and is an
amazing opportunity not to be missed!
The server will take it, that's no problem. PHPBB also has (I believe) a
mailing list bridge - as I mentioned previously, I personally would be
against a forum without a bridge. (My vote doesn't count for anything
special though!)
Joomla has its own forum that it integrates with more easily but I don't
know about the bridging options there.
I appreciate i am the 'new boy in town' ... but without furtherado
just know that the offer remains open and as i said - i am more than
happy to help out if and where I can. We are all here to learn from
each other.
We have a lot of "new boys" here as well as some who have been around a
bit longer; of the list regulars I'm one of the "old boys" now I suppose
but there's still plenty here who've been around this LUG a lot longer
than me.
If you fancy a project along the lines of what you've already suggested,
then finding out about mailing list bridges to forums and how we
integrate them with Joomla would be a great help.
--
Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0845 45 89 555
Registered in England (0456 0902) at 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG
_______________________________________________
Peterboro mailing list
[email protected]
https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/peterboro
