Compassdesigns.net

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The New Compass Designs Blog

By 15 Comments

If you are a vaguely regular reader of this blog, you’ll have noticed its been a bit quiet recently. For the last year I have been hard at work in my new job as an Associate Director at a Graduate School of Education – the Upper Valley Educators Institute. As such I haven’t had the time to do much here at compassdesigns.net.

If you notice the new look, that’s now changing!

Along with the new look, I have converted from Joomla to WordPress. I don’t spend much time in the Joomlasphere now, and this blog will be changing to reflect that. Joomla will be just one aspect of web and technology topics I plan to talk about. A much larger focus will be education, teaching and schools. My day time job is training new teachers and principals, as well as working with teachers in schools. Many people agree that there are major issues with the American public school system. If you know a teacher, or have kids in schools, hang around for some hopefully interesting discussions.

  • pablo

    I like the new design, First I like joomla and second I start to use wordpress but I found more professional joomla than wordpress anyway I wish you a good road.

  • Very interesting Barry. Wishing you success on your road forward!

  • Tom Webb

    Congradulations on making your career change. I’m sure that you’ll bring your passions and talents to benefit what you are doing now and into the future. Thanks for the long time inspirations in the Joomla-sphere and I’ll still subscribe to your blog as it covers areas of interest to me still. Wishing you the very best…

  • James

    Joomla is sunset but WordPress is still very Popular after all these years and still competing with other WebSite Design software. Am dropping DreamWeaver because am not intending to spend lots of time on it.

  • Pepper

    Dear Barrie, the most profoundly important occupation in the world is the education of children and the training of children’s educators. I too have a graduate degree in education and producing educational materials and websites and tools for educators and their schools has been the passion of my life.

    Yes, I am an absolute believer in Joomla and I do like where it is going very much. It is the perfect tool for my work. I am a designer, graphic designer, as my lifelong career and I design and custom code all my Joomla templates. I am just not inspired to do that with Word Press. Using the right tool for you, and for the job, is important. Joomla is native to my way of thinking. And what I want to say here is that you are the one who made this possible . . . because you are an educator.

    Knowing you have gone into education on a large scale pleases me. The reason I got into Joomla in the first place is your first Joomla book. Chapter 9 was a complete set of directions for making custom templates from scratch. I got it. I did it. The success that resulted is my history. You are very much an educator. No one else has provided such clarity in publication on Joomla in a way that made sense for me. You were responsible as an educator for opening up my world of Joomla, and I am and always will be grateful to you for that. Thank you!!

    Best wishes to you as you train the educators of tomorrow’s world! They need good people like you! I hope others can accept your new directions. Joomla will still stay and grow strong for everyone who needs and loves it.

  • Brad

    I agree with you Barrie. You need to chose the right tool for the job. I am a Director of Technology and Educational Technologist and have always made my decisions based off of the needs of my teachers and students. Good luck with everything and I will definitely be keeping an eye on your blog for tips that I can use here at my school.

  • Larry

    It’s not Joomla vs. WordPress. I sympathize. There is so much happening with both platforms and as one person I find it hard to keep up with both just keeping them updated.

    I limit myself to the two in my offers to clients and if I had to pick just one, I’d pick the one I can have the most clients with. The Joomla platform is far more powerful and is great for my larger clients. But many smaller clients want to use Hootsuite style editors and Joomla falls behind with simplicity right now.

    It could change though.

  • Antimidas

    *Gasp* The guy who wrote the book on Joomla moves to WordPress! But it is all a matter of choice. I use a variety of software for a variety of tasks. Nothing is a one size fits all anymore. It is not that one is any better than another. It is a matter of why kill a fly with a sledgehammer. It is a choice of the right tool for the right job. Congrats on the switch and good to see your emails back in my inbox.

    • 🙂

      I have always been an advocate of exactly what you say, choose the tool for the job, With a pure focus on blogging going forward, WordPress is a good fit for me now!

  • GL

    I think the WordPress v Joomla (or vice versa) is about like the Wordperfect v. MS Word back in the day. Whatever you “grew up with” was the easier one.

    Personally, I think that Joomla’s focus on menus and hanging articles off of them in combination with categories is very challenging to get hold of at first. WordPress isn’t a lot easier if you really want a lot of control over where things go on a page (e.g. trying to use WP as a very simple web site or… integrating it with a Dreamweaver-developed website… for example)

    with a little practice either one can be learned (although, I still haven’t hacked apart a WP site to my satisfaction … to where I can run the loop in one or two div tags of my choice and only have that content updated on my site. alas. personal projects abound).

  • I think I would also add that the WordPress backend is not at all intuitive. I’d say Joomla is far more so.

  • I agree with Barrie, it’s a bit more than just ‘WordPress is better than Joomla’.
    I find WordPress is great for what it does… blogs. Joomla is more than that, and it seems easier for me to create different types of sites with Joomla with all of the workable, maintained extensions.

    WordPress, at least for me, seems to be a mess of settings in the backend when trying to do more than just your basic blog and pages/posts.

    It actually reminds me of the original Joomla/Mambo stuff with ‘static pages’ AND ‘articles’.

    Perhaps the nightmare of the Joomla migrations has a silver lining, and that is that the whole structure of Joomla content shifted to be more expandable.

    As for post-1.5 being too hard, I find the opposite. 2.5 is much better to maintain, and with more extensions using the Update feature in Joomla, hopefully things become even easier.

  • murray

    Congratulations Barrie. This email was going to prompt me to suggest to you that Joomla post 1.5 had got too hard to use and maintain, and suggest you use your influence to direct the Joomla developers in making it (Joomla) easier to use. I see you have jumped ship however, and like me moved to WordPress. Best of luck in your new direction

    • Hi Murray
      Well, I think that its more complicated than that. WordPress started as a blog platform, and always excelled at it. You could extend it, but perhaps not as easily as Joomla. Now my needs are narrower and the tool for the job is probably WordPress.