Time flies!  Or to quote the more precise translation, Time Flees.

A few days ago I noticed that the last entry I made here was almost two years ago.  My calculations, If correct, say it has been 687 days since the last entry.

Why no entries since May 2010 you ask?  The answer is that my interests in other endeavors has consumed the time I used to spend posting articles here.  As a result,there will be no more posts to this blog.

I discovered yet one more reason for my insistence that Linux is still not ready for primetime as as desktop operating system.  Until recently, my biggest complaint was the lousy support for wireless cards using the Broadcom chip sets.  However, the version of Ubuntu Linux and the kernel I have installed now appears to have finally resolved this issue (at least for the ancient 802.11b/11g card in my laptop).  So much for that…on to my next rant.

I have an ancient (circa 2001) Dell Dimension 8200 desktop that uses Ubuntu Linux 9.10 as its operating system.  The hardware configuration includes:

• 2Ghz Pentium 4 CPU
• 512MB RAM
• Graphics Card with NVIDIA GeForce2 MX/MX 400 Graphics processor
• Dell D1025TM Monitor
• and a number of the other usual suspects.

When I did the initial install of Ubuntu 9.04, I let the installer choose the best configuration based on the hardware configuration and resources.  This included the Visual Effects, which the Ubuntu install set to “None.” This does not require the enhanced capabilities of the GeForce2 graphics processor. 

One day boredom set in and I decided to try the “Normal” configuration.  This required loading of the restricted (i.e., proprietary) NVIDIA driver for the GeForce2 MX/MX400, followed by a reboot of the system to install the driver. 

I encountered my first problem upon the system reboot.  The driver had set the screen resolution to 640x480.  I fumbled around with this for a while but finally got the resolution set to 1024x768 via the NVIDIA X Server Settings utility.  I did a reboot and everything looked fine…or least it did at first glance.   But, just as I was getting ready to congratulate myself on yet one more time beating Linux into submission, my smugness came to a screeching halt.  There was something missing in the application windows.  

I had no clue as to what happened.  My first thought was that I had  inadvertently done something to turn off the Titlebar display when I was changing the screen resolution.  I ran  the NVIDIA X Server Settings utility again and set everything to the default values except the screen resolution.  I rebooted, still had same problem.

I then set the visual effects back to “None” and rebooted, fully expecting to see no Titlebar.  Surprise, surprise…the missing Titlebar reappeared.   Big clue!  

Armed with this clue I went to the Big Help Desk in the Sky, otherwise known as Google.  Did a search on “Ubuntu NVIDIA Titlebar” and got a number of hits.  I soon found a solution to my problem at the Pen Drive Linux web site.  Here is an extract of the solution:

The following tutorial explains how to fix the Compiz Ubuntu Desktop Effects missing titlebar problem. If you've been toying around with Ubuntu 7.04 and have enabled Desktop Effects "Compiz", you might notice that the titlebar or window decorations have disappeared. This is a fairly common problem amongst systems using ATI or Nvidia video cards and commonly occurs after switching to a higher resolution. The fix is fairly simple.

The most telling information here regarding the state of screen drivers and Linux is the version of Ubuntu that the extract cites (Ubuntu 7.04, released in April 2007).  The version I had this problem with was Ubuntu 9.10, which was released in October 2009.  

By the way, the AddARGBVisuals and AddARGBLXVisuals options tells the driver to display (True) or hide (False) the window decorations, one of which is the Titlebar.

Ubuntu™ is a product of Canonical, Ltd™.
NVIDIA and GeForce are registered trademarks of the NVIDIA Corporation.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor, Rich Man, Poor Man, Beggar Man, Thief

In terms of Internet time, one can consider Joomla! as a young adult who is trying to figure out what he/she wants to do with the rest of their life and is having an identity crisis in the process.  The Joomla project on one hand wants to remain true to its Mission, Vision & Values.  On the other, it is currently engaging a professional PR Firm to increase it’s brand recognition. 

What Joomla! does not have that a number of other OSS projects do have is one or more commercial entities that provide them with “free” marketing and PR services.  Acquia, Automattic, redhat, Canonical (Ubuntu), Oracle (OpenOffice) come to mind here.

Now that I’ve stated the above, some of you will proceed directly to the comments form and delineate the many evils of commercial entities and the OSS projects that are “conspiring” with them.  Some will suffer from “Twitter Deprivation” and move on.  Others, thinking “What the hell is this idiot talking about?” will read on out of pure curiosity.  And some will simply read on with no malice aforethought!

Now I do not claim to be an expert regarding organizational models adopted by the various OSS projects, or any marketing and PR on their behalf (although I did suffer though a Marketing 101 course many years ago…I needed 3 credit-hours and the class schedule met my needs!).

What I do know is from the outside looking in and not having a clue about the inner workings of the Joomla Leadership Team (LT), Community Oversight Committee (CoC),  and Open Source Matters, Inc. (OSM), my perception is that in the race to capture the hearts and minds of the corporate and government worlds, Joomla is losing, or may have already lost. 

Now many may say that the Joomla project is OSS and, as such, they are not competing with their OSS brethren in this or any other arena.  And that may well be true.  But one can also say that neither are the Drupal and Wordpress projects.  The difference is that their commercial champions are.

To date, and absent any household-name, deep pocket benefactors, Joomla has had astounding success.  It has spawned thousands of small businesses who have in turn spawned many thousands of sites for small and medium businesses around the globe.  If one believes in statistics,  only Wordpress surpasses Joomla in the number of installed sites.  And this statistic is probably biased, as Wordpress has much more usage as a blogging engine rather than as a CMS.

In the meantime, OSS associated with strong commercial brand names have made impressive inroads into the corporate/government markets.  An example here is the use of Drupal as the platform for Whitehouse.gov and other US Government sites.  Does this mean Drupal is “better” than Joomla?  Not really, it just means the winning commercial bidder for the Whitehouse.gov contract used Drupal to fulfill the Government’s Request for Proposal (RFP) requirements for CMS features and capabilities. 

In conclusion, my opinion…

I am not by any means qualified to speak for the Joomla leadership and really do not care to do battle with the hordes over the leadership, organization or future direction of the Joomla project.  But what I do know is that Joomla really needs to decide what it wants to be as a grown-up and share this with the community.  And the project is big-time swimming upstream if its real intent is to compete with the commercial entities that are purveyors of Joomla’s OSS brethren.

Disclaimer: I have no financial or other interests in any of the open source or commercial entities referenced in this tome.  And I long ago gave up on software development as a source of income. 

Have you ever had the need to produce a web site that needed dynamic CMS features and capabilities but felt that using one of the usual suspects (Drupal, Joomla!, Wordpress, etc.) was the equivalent of using a sledgehammer to kill a fly?

That's certainly the feeling I had when finally getting around to refactoring a small site of mine that has been on the Internet since 1997.  There had been numerous updates and tweaks made to the site over the years, but it was still based on static html pages and a bunch of customized (and poorly organized) javascripts.  Adding or modifying content was a manual process.

I had almost talked myself into using Wordpress, as all I really needed was the framework and the equivalent of the Wordpress Page content type.  But, at the last moment, I stumbled upon a lightweight CMS called GetSimple.  It is advertised as "The Simplest Content Management System Ever" and appeared to have the basic features and capabilities I was looking for.  I downloaded a copy and installed it in a subdirectory off of my web server's root.

Next came the configuration, which was a simple one-page fill-in-the-forms exercise.  so far, so good.

I then did my typical thing, which is to pretend that I am all knowing and proceed without bothering to read the documentation.  The first order of business was to develop a theme for the site.  I did this by using GetSimple's default theme as a learning tool and modifying it to meet my needs.  GetSimple themes are similar to those used in Drupal and Wordpress, i.e., they use PHP function calls to manage and provide the raw content, along with xHTML statements and cascading style sheets (CSS) to manage the content layout and presentation. Here's an example extracted from the default template.php file:

<div id="bodycontent">
    <div class="post">
        <h1><?php get_page_title(); ?></h1> 
    <div class="postcontent">
        <?php get_page_content(); ?>
    </div>
</div>

In GetSimple templates, breadcrumbs, sidebars and other like constructs are called components.  They are generated by the get_component() function as shown in the following example.

<?php get_component('sidebar'); ?>

The GetSimple default theme and my site's custom theme are shown below:

Now that I had become an "expert" GetSimple theme designer, the next step was to generate some data.  GetSimple has only one content type and it is aptly named "Page."  But it has the ability to assign a different template to each page, so for all practical purposes, one can generate a number of different content types by developping different templates.  As seen in the example below, there are a number of other options associated with pages.  Most are typical of the options found in many other CMSs.

GetSimple differs from a number of today's open source CMSs in that it does not use Mysql and/or PostgreSQL as its DBMS.  Instead it stores database entries as XML-formatted flat files in the data subdirectory of the GetSimple root. The example shown below is the XML file for a Contact Us page based on a template named bbcontact.php.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<item>
<pubDate>Sun, 21 Feb 2010 09:25:34 -0500</pubDate>
<title><![CDATA[Contact HR's Big Box]]></title>
<url><![CDATA[contact-hrs-big-box]]></url>
<meta></meta>
<metad></metad>
<menu><![CDATA[Contact Us]]></menu>
<menuOrder><![CDATA[5]]></menuOrder>
<menuStatus><![CDATA[Y]]></menuStatus>
<template><![CDATA[bbcontact.php]]></template>
<parent></parent>
<content></content>
<private></private>
</item>

That's about it.  I'm not going to go into any more detail here but will mention that GetSimple capabilities also also include friendly URLs, WYSIWYG editing, file uploading, automatic page backup, and scheduled events via cron.  As of the latest release, it also supports plugins, but there are not very many available at this time.

In conclusion, I found GetSimple to have an almost flat learning curve, a simple and easy to understand Administrative User Interface (UI) and more than adequate features and capabilities to support my needs for this particular site.  I have no real basis for determining how scalable GetSimple is, but I would expect that it would be more than capable for use as a platform for a small site with basic content management needs.