Web Site Status as of: 10.08.10
- I (the PI) "like" the site content a bit more now that, I guess-timate, 80% of the basic site features and inter-page navigation methods are setup.
- I (the PI) added new content and updated some existing content on the site much more often in June, July, and thus far in August than I was able to do in previous months. I am "getting the feel" of what the "educational news gathering" part of this site might work like "in the back office", so to speak, if and when this site "goes LIVE" -- and has at least a part-time ed-news Internet researcher to perform, say, 80% of that news gathering and submitting to this site.
- The planned "two levels" of "active project information" for the casual site visitor exists as part of the site features but needs a good deal more attention and more careful configuration.
Interesting Technical Changes and Challenges in June-July-August:
- I (the PI) slightly reformatted the display of the "countdown to..." timer in the r.h.s. sidebar list of menus and module information. It now probably makes more sense to the casual site visitor, even though "beta" and "live" are not well defined on the site or in the "glossary" yet. I have to look at it every day and decide if the deadline "go LIVE" date is realistic or not.
- I (the PI) added the "SubCategories" extension and upgraded the Joomla CMS version from v1.5.14, which I'd been using since mid 2009, to the current v1.5.18. However, I have not yet used "subcategories" advantageously to organize and present content on the site.
- Site Navigation and Searching Puzzles: I (the PI) added a few sub-categories to at least two of the existing categories of articles I had setup on the site. The highest level of articles in Joomla are collected in what the Joomla CMS calls "sections"; "sections" can have one or more "categories" within them. Now those categories can have zero or some great number of sub-categories as well, and sub-sub-categories and so on. However if I organize the site with "too many sub-categories", then I force the site visitors and site users to "traverse" through the "tree" of sections, categories, and sub-categories. That "traversal" (navigation) becomes more and more tedious. Alternatively, the "Search" feature turns out to work very well for finding all sorts of articles AND web links AND comments, etc. all of which will appear on one "answer page". But to make "article finding" in some ways easier for computer-phobic site visitors and logged-in site users, I'll be using an "article tagging" system in (i.e. extension for) Joomla. Tagging articles "properly" may become more and more important to help users search and find "related" articles, if and when they do not already know in which category or sub-category on the site the articles can be found. There is also the possibility with "more clever tagging" of "sequencing" related articles in various ways such as from "introduction" to "easily understood" to "hard to understand".
- I (the PI) turned-on the "show category names within a section" feature. Categories that are defined within any section now are listed when the user clicks on a menu-item which then presents "section information" in the middle of the web page.
Minor Problems:
- Sometime in the last two weeks of May or first two weeks of June, I, the PI and site builder, introduced some minor "bugs" into "the system" such that repeated but apparently insignificant and unrelated "error messages" when I save an article or install or change an extension. The "bugs" are probably some left over rows in 1+ tables of the system database which failed get automatically deleted when I deleted or reinstalled some extension.
- NO MENUS show levels of sub-menus yet; SOME MENUS that are linked to "a named section" properly show the highest level categories of that section in the center-most "content" part of a web page. But that presentation needs much "cleaning up".
- I have not yet experimented with showing "sub-categories" (i.e. 2+ levels of categories) in that center-most "content" part of a web page.
Wanted:
- A way to add "tags" to web links, then let users search for "tagged articles" AND "tagged web links" on this site, receiving a web page -- or series of web pages -- with both the links to the articles and the off-site web-links included in that returned list. I may have to make that "extension" (or 2+ extensions) myself. This turns out to be a "much wanted" feature few to no Joomla extension developers have made available to Joomla v1.0 and v1.5 users in the last several years.
- A way to assign an article or a web link to 2 or more categories (or sub categories)! This also has been a "much wanted" feature for several years of Joomla site-developers.
- A way for categories of articles AND of web links to be the SAME categories (i.e. to not be duplicated names in both "content-type parts" of a Joomla site, which would be easy to do in Drupal).