For one of the projects at a client site, the client had asked us to look into building a customized CMS for them.  We are looking at a couple of different options that are available including using drupal, joomla, MOSS, ektron’s solution etc..  Last night, when doing the installation for the first time for Joomla, after having installed the WAMP server and then unzipping the joomla 1.5 download in the www folder, we made the mistake of just re-naming the default configuration.php-dist file that comes with the install to configuration.php.

As a result, we were always getting the error of deleting the installation folder before it would allow the install to move forward.  In one of the forums a senior joomla developer suggested to simply re-name that file and configure it through the GUI which will create the new configuration.php file.  And that worked.  Now, we are all set to play with this wonderful CMS and see it’s capabilities.  Being a MSFT technologies shop, we might want to move to MOSS however for this project since the client wants some of the features that are already available in some open source CMS, we might go with an open source solution for this project not to mention that the costs will be less also.  Needless to state that we will be outsourcing that work to our off-shore partner since we do not have the open source capabilities in-house.  But this will be a good learning experience and we are looking forward to it.  Here are some helpful links for those evaluating Joomla:

http://help.joomla.org/

http://forum.joomla.org/

http://docs.joomla.org/Beginners

http://downloads.joomlacode.org/docmanfileversion/1/7/4/17471/1.5_Installation_Manual_version_0.5.pdf

Ahhh… Acronyms – what will the IT world be without these wonderful acronyms. Yesterday, a good friend mentioned that he is working on a LAMP project. So, do you know what it stands for?

LAMP stands for:

L –> Linux

A –> Apache

M –> MySQL

P –> PHP

That’s the complete open source platform that he was using. Likewise, if you are using only a Windows based implementation, another acronym to be familiar with is WISA:

WISA stands for:

W –> Windows

I –> IIS

S –> SQL Server

A –> ASP.Net

Then, there are different permutations of these like: WISP or WASP or WIMP or WIMA (the alphabets stand for the same technologies as stated above).