WordPress Themes & Drupal update

I’m going to hopping back and forth between doing preliminary reading on Drupal while also working through the Mati Fuller book on WordPress.

Now I’m reading about customizing Themes — I’m using Techozoic Fluid because she recommended Jeremy Clark. He seems like a good guy — I posted something on his site and he was quick to respond.

I must say that I’m not having the easiest time trying to figure out what I should actually be changing in terms of font-size and color. For example, I find it difficult knowing what the corresponding name is to the component that I want to change in the General Settings. One strategy I suppose would be to do one field at a time and then see what actually changes.

Don’t forget, after making a change, to hit the refresh key after going back to the web-site to check — I didn’t realize I was actually making changes until I hit refresh.

I think the whole font-size thing is a tad awkward to figure out, but it’ll probably come clearer when getting deeper into CSS and making specific changes.

I somewhat became impatient so just clicked “reset” within General Settings, which put everything back to a default. Everythings a bit small, but I know how to fix that, basically…

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Understanding Drupal (Content Management System)

My general understanding so far is that a Content Management System (CMS), like Drupal, could be the actualization of a Desired Outcome of understanding and/or knowledge – a means of positioning real data and information for viewer consumption, with a slight possibility of discussion/input. Once designed, installed, and functioning it’s a matter of keeping the content fresh and interesting.

A blog (WebBlog) is more a venue for dialog about various topics. Much like what I’m doing in this post — discussing the difference between CMS and Blog. I’m very new to Web Development, so my Blog postings should not be read as the “truth” and will most likely be edited over time. I’d hope that on my Blog, people will contribute useful information to share to aid in my understanding and to demonstrate their skill/understanding of various topics.

The eventual content within my CMS will be closer to the “truth” and will communicate usable information, facts and positions. My plan is to create various CMS sites that willl address my various interests: General Aviation, Ham Radio, GIS, Electronics, GeoCaching, Mom’s theater (Senga). I may even dabble in work-related content which would include: Domino, Lotus Notes, CRM, Mapping (Personal Brain), Camtasia and other applications.

Drupal, so far, has a really good web-site at www.drupal.org where it breaks everything done into manageable chunks. I’m inspired to actually read and understand stuff before immediately heading down the path of installation. The idea is to start off basic and work your way up from there.

This whole Web Development interest will definitely be a great project for GTD (Getting Things Done). You’ll see how I use principles of GTD into this project, among many others. Even if nobody reads this Blog, I’m still finding it useful to tease the associative ideas out of my head into a linear format that I can then start creating Projects and Actions around.

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Drupal – here we come…

Originally attempted to install and configure Joomla — objective is to create a CMS for my mom’s web-site — www.franciscabeach.com. Doesn’t really need a blog-type format.

Ran into some install challenges with Joomla during initial configuration — needing to create a backdoor admin password. Various #1146 errors which I’m sure I’ll understand later when I get into PHP database administration.

Noticed that the database tables are not created yet – -that probably happens after the initial log-in and install.php process.

Robert advised to check out www.drupal.org — I know Chirill is using this and am getting positive comments from both of them.

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