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Designing Personal Sites - Programming POV

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Shades:
The same can be said for Joomla too...there are many template sites that have both free and commercially licensed templates. I'm much more familiar with Joomla than with other CMS systems, but that doesn't mean much. But with a little digging, you can adjust templates to your hearts content. With a tool called Artisteer it isn't hard to create your own Joomla template, but it ain't free. However, Joomla comes with a standard set of templates, which will show you how templates are structured and you can go ahead with creating new templates in Windows notepad.

Shop plug-ins/mods/extensions for Joomla can cost money, but most have limited free versions. Limits such as amount of products and/or methods of payment, etc. In the Joomla plug-in store, you'll find many commercially licensed plug-ins/mods/extensions, but if you look a bit further there is more than enough free stuff available. It all depends on what you want to do/make available on your own web-site.

But I am sure that the WordPress fans here have multiple examples of such plug-ins/mods/extensions too.

Using XAMPP (or similar tool) you can quickly find out which CMS is for you, or if you want to use a CMS at all.

wraith808:
I'm actually not a fan of wordpress, which is the reason when I saw there was an opportunity for hosted Ghost, I took it.  But the reality is, Wordpress dominates the scene, is easily moddable, and has a thriving community.  I tried Joomla and it was just too much, and if I was going to go through that much trouble, I might as well just make my site.

Lintalist:
What about static site generators? https://getnikola.com/ (python) or jekyll (ruby) - plenty more here https://www.staticgen.com/

wraith808:
What about static site generators? https://getnikola.com/ (python) or jekyll (ruby) - plenty more here https://www.staticgen.com/
-Lintalist (May 22, 2016, 08:22 AM)
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I tried those for a while- jekyll and hugo (http://gohugo.io/).  My problems with those was the idiosyncrasies of where everything went.  A DC'er started a course on Hugo, and almost immediately I liked it better than jekyll.  But as time went on, and I wanted to do something that wasn't simple, it still became a nightmare to maintain and generate for changes- at least to me.

Asudem:
But if you want to get down to the metal I would find a good html/css forum and pick the brains of the pros there.  If you are willing to do the html and/or css they are willing to help you get around the obstacles.  If you use a design tool then your are pretty much limited to getting help with that one tool.

One of the frustrating bits about going the html and css route is that various browsers have quirks how they interpret the markup.  Most notorious is IE.  Since Microsoft is the 800 LB gorilla you cannot say "IE is non compliant so screw IE" if you are doing web pages for a living.  :)
-MilesAhead (May 21, 2016, 09:34 AM)
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I'm kind of nervous about jumping into yet another forum. I've got here and StackOverflow (that double edged community though), but my problem isn't really the obstacles. I love the challenge, I just don't know what aesthetics are when it comes to web design.

I am also a stickler when it comes to cross-browser compatibility, but I do have on my site that it is "designed with Firefox in mind".

I've had this particular dilemma before, and have finally found that there is a reason that wordpress is so popular.  It just works, can be altered pretty easily to be what you want with themes and plugins, and you can get help easily.  I've recently changed to paying for ghost hosting, because wordpress is such a target, and that's the bit you exchange the commonality of it for.

But that would be my suggestion.  Go with something that is easily hackable and widespread.  Especially if it's just for personal use.
-wraith808 (May 21, 2016, 02:49 PM)
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I dunno. I feel like I want a site and not a blog. I social media enough on my social medias and don't need yet another place to post updates where no one but people who has my resume will read them. Currently my site is in ASP.NET because, well, I am a .NET programmer, but the things you can do with ASP are so limited cosmetically that there's currently only one line of code that uses actual ASP.NET code in the whole friggin site. I do like the idea of a master template though.

I second Wordpress. There are entire marketplaces of themes, many are free, many are not. And if you dig into the source code, you can, of course, customize the look of Wordpress yourself.
-Deozaan (May 21, 2016, 04:23 PM)
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I'll give it a shot I guess. I can't knock it until I try it. Joomla! on it's site has this cool "Try your own Joomla! server for 90 minutes" thing which was very useful in my decision to skip Joomla!. Anything like that with WordPress?

What about static site generators? https://getnikola.com/ (python) or jekyll (ruby) - plenty more here https://www.staticgen.com/
-Lintalist (May 22, 2016, 08:22 AM)
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After handling my old job's static website for years, I am going to pass on any kind of static website, unless someone can prove to me they don't have to be a huge pain in the butt to update one line of code across all the files/pages.

My problems with those was the idiosyncrasies of where everything went.
-wraith808 (May 22, 2016, 09:23 AM)
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This is also one of my many problems with static sites.

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