A Short Introduction

Hi there. This is Miles , one of the many volunteers involved in creating this website. This website has been a long time in the making, but will hopefully stay fresh and current for many years to come, because it is based on a design template which can be easily added to and updated.

Slaving Away...

Purpose

This website occupies a space perched between the strictly formatted California State Government websites, including our official website, (see disclaimer ) and the educational/public outreach format of sites such as seaotterresearch.org which is wider in scope, but only shows parts of the role of our facility in marine wildlife rehabilitation and research.

Much of the benefit of a Content Management System (CMS) such as Joomla! which is running this site, is that any content that is written for the site, this article, for example, is stored in a database.

As people add more content to the website, the database grows, but remains organized. We can then design how we want this information to be displayed on the site, where we want to place it, and how we want it to appear in relation to similar information.

In summary, most places you visit will lead you to other related areas, and content will be continually added. For example, research headed by a staff member will appear in a link under their individual profile, and conversely, mentions of them in the page describing their research project will link back to their profile.

Content is stored in a database, which displays the information on the website

How About Elaborating on Those Technical Aspects of the Website?

Uh, sure...since you asked. Think of this website as having two faces. The public, or front-end face, is the side you see when you come sauntering up to mwvcrc.org. You get articles on the front page, links to recent articles, and menus on the top and left-hand side of the page. The private, or back-end of the website, is a website, too:

The back-end interface

What's in Back?

First, it is how authors add content to the website. How easy is this? Easy:

Log in to the back-end.

Add new content item

Specify what category and section it belongs in (more below).

Hit Publish, and wham, it's now live on your website.

Second, it is how website administrators decide *how* to display the content that the authors write. When one sets up a CMS like Joomla to run for the first time, it comes with many basic tools for accomplishing this task. You can design menus, and specify what content is linked to the menus, and how that content is displayed. Joomla uses the terminology Modules, Mambots, and Components to differentiate between the special programs that take your content and display them on the website.

Examples of Joomla Components Used on This Site

Note that most extensions mentioned below can be found here: Joomla Extensions, which is one of the more complete extensions directories for Joomla.

When you click on the Staff link on the top menu, you are brought to a page handled by a useful component called Peoplebook , which is a special program written for Joomla to display staff listings. Not only does it display staff information neatly on the front-end of the website, but it provides a useful back-end interface for entering and updating information.

On the back-end of the website, authors can upload photos to go with the articles they write, using a nifty program called Joomla Xplorer .

Also on the back-end the program used to write and edit articles is called JCEditor, another program to interface with the Joomla CMS.

For the Affiliated Institutions link on the top menu, we use a component called Bookmarks to edit and organize links to other institutions.

For the Media Gallery, we use a self-contained program called PHP Gallery (version 2) to manage our media online. You can see an example of a stand-alone version of PHP Gallery at the Sea Lion Stranding Gallery (listed on the Affiliated Institutions page, of course!). The Gallery content is loaded into the Joomla CMS using a special program called Gallery2 Bridge, which is a plug-in for Joomla.

For content backup (which is pretty much all of the text you see on the website) I use a utility called ebackup , which is scheduled to run automatically and back up all of the data into another directory. I also have enabled it to e-mail me a copy of the data.

For the Research/Publications area of the site, the articles are all contained in a database, originally in MS Access, which I imported into MySQL. To access these records within the Joomla CMS and display them on the website, and also to update the database as new papers are published and in press, I'm using a component called Database Query .

Organizing Content -- Sections and Categories

This is perhaps the steepest learning curve in Joomla. When you create items in the back-end, you have to assign them to both a section and a category within Joomla. This means that there is a three level hierarchy in Joomla: Sections, which hold Categories, and Categories, which in turn hold your individual Content Items.

Let's stop for a minute and acknowledge that this system of organization leaves a LOT to be desired. It CAN provide a level of organization within the back-end of the website. After all, you can filter all of your content items by section and category, so it cuts down on the amount of stuff you have to look through if you want to edit a particular item. BUT, it is hard to neatly fit all content items on your website into Sections and then into Categories. Future versions of Joomla will allow you a deeper hierarchy, and will do away with the strict hierarchy, but for now, read on.

Organizing Content -- Menus

Once you have a few sections and categories in the back-end of your Joomla website, and a few content items within the categories, you are set to start playing around with menus on the front end of the website. (note: Joomla will ask you at the beginning of the installation process if you want to install sample content--DO THIS, as it allows you to see how structure is organized)

It is important to remember that Menus commonly display the following website content:

Items from a Section (essentially all items in all categories from that section)

Items from a Category (all items in that category)

A Joomla Component (such as Peoplebook (see below)

An external link.

And, if displaying content from sections or categories, you can either display a list of Item titles, or titles and introductory text (blog format).

Using Templates

Our template was originally written by joomla-templates.com and heavily modified by Faun (contact info coming later). The wonderful thing about Joomla templates are that you can set different templates to display different changes, and when you change a template, you only change the "look and feel" of the website -- the actual content remains untouched. You should not necessarily have to pay for a template. Writing them involves a knowledge of CSS, and a small amount of PHP to display information provided by Joomla, but by and large, you should start by experimenting with a free template that looks halfway decent, then organize your website and write the content, and THEN go back and make the template exactly to your liking.

Other Good Things About Content Management Systems

The programming is completely language independent, and you can change the language of the website with different language files.

Search Engine Optimization (or SEO)

There is a whole science, and industry, behind search engine optimization, and a hundred good methods for making sure people find your site. However, research websites are different then business websites because research is collaborative more then it is competitive. The key to making sure people find your site is by accurately describing it in the META tags in your code, by submitting it to search engines (most importantly to Google , and also by generating a site map that Google can display when your website comes up in a user's search. The key here is not for people to find your website before they find somebody else's similar website--instead, they should be able to find your website based on a search for common keywords.

This Whole Thing Sounds Great! What do I Need to Know to Get Started on my Own Website?

You can get moderately far in seeing how this works on your own website by downloading Joomla and installing it into your own website by following the instructions.

Your next step is to start exploring many of the extensions (modules, components, and mambots) that work within Joomla.

You should then start adding content, even if just writing small test articles, and experimenting in the back-end with how to link articles, sections, and categories to menus.

You should read Anna's Mambo Tips for more common fundamentals about working within Joomla. Mambo, by the way, was the free predecessor to Joomla. Mambo decided to commercialize, at which point Joomla was broken off into a new, free project--their fundamental concepts in how content is displayed remain the same.

You should start experimenting with templates .

You may also want to engage in the ultimate vanity by changing the favorites icon which is the icon next to the URL in your address bar by using the handy conversion program at this site: http://www.chami.com/tips/internet/110599I.html

Then go deeper:

Learn how the templates display the information provided by Joomla. Start to modify the basic free templates Joomla provides to give you the look and feel that you desire. This will require a basic understanding of HTML and CSS.

Next, go further into the world of programming. Joomla is written in a programming language called PHP , and your content is stored in a database called mySQL . By learning about database structure and manipulating data with PHP, you can better understand how data goes into and subsequently gets pulled out of your database so it will be displayed on your website.

More Meta-Information:

I'm keeping a website log to keep track of the work that I do on this site, including problems I've run into and subsequently resolved. Some of this may be of help to you, should you decide to design your own site using the Joomla CMS. For even more help, I keep a running list of obscure UNIX commands that I always forget, yet often use, when administering the website.