Well its early days in our relationship but so far, Joomla! and I are getting along just fine. Since I installed it I’ve had a proper fiddle with most of the bits and pieces (mostly turning things off actually!!) and now its looking much better.

Since I’ll want to introduce fixtures, I’ve used a calendar extension called EventList from schlu.net and its fabulous. It took me ages to get the idea that to change how a category displays its items, you edit the menu item that points to it. It still seems like a bit of a funny concept (what if you link to it from somewhere else?) but it really works now I’ve figured it out. I used this to stop the date and author being displayed in the “Venues” section, since they don’t mean a lot. To remove the same information from the individual articles I edited each article individually.

I’ve also changed templates, there are loads available to download but I was struggling a bit with ones I didn’t like or didn’t know how to change. In the end I chose the “sporticus” one from www.rockettheme.com, it was easy to change the colour and I made some other changes to it as well.

At one point I got quite stressed with the layout of news articles on the front page, one or two was fine, but three did a funny layout with one at the top and the next two next to each other. Once again its the menu item property, I changed the number of columns to put all the articles in line with one another and it looks great!

The other thing I must mention is the community, I’ve registered for the forums but so far have been able to find things I needed just by searching the threads. The tone of the forums is much nicer than I’ve seen elsewhere and most of the Joomla! gang seem keen to spread the word. I must also give a special mention to my phpwomen friend and personal Joomla! consultant, Amy who has been very helpful and even answered questions before I ask them :)