Senior Project; Finale

It's been a couple months of work, but this is finally the end. I have tried 6 different platforms for digital content, backed with my few years of working with HTML, CSS and PHP.

We were all given sheets to fill out, all about "Senior Project"; we had to learn something new, something we could make projects with and present the knowledge gained. I had all sorts of small ideas, but couldn't really plan nearly 10 weeks of time on any of them. The realization of "wordpress alternatives" hit me like a brick, and the more I thought on it the more I realized it was a homerun; I could set up each day for doing a different thing with each platform, and by Friday show everything off.

Of course, life is rarely so generous; I was already a little behind, several websites were blocked by the school's filter, a few being far too complicated or required executables to be downloaded. But I got on track, and thus I looked into and figured out how to work with Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, Wix, Pagecloud, and Weebly.

Thanks to an application called MAMP, I was able to host a local server for using Drupal, Joomla, and Wordpress. Those aren't anything tangible that I can link to you, beyond what I have posted, due to the fact that it was entirely local. There was lots of toying around with settings to get them online, but they were infinitely more customizable and personalizable then the other 3 cloud-based and online platforms.


Which, I've done some thinking; I sort of understand now why users might be more drawn to that. Having tech support on call is a fair boon, and even if the cost is making things look exactly how you want them to look it certainly takes prior knowledge/skill to mess with things without breaking them when it comes to complicated organisms such as websites.




If I did it again I would start off with note-taking; I didn't figure out that was a thing until haflway through, and boy did it help my blog posting. I would also start earlier; I missed most of the deadlines (although not by much) because I typically underestimated just how much I had to write about.

Really, the lesson to take away there is a common one: prepare a time cushion, just in case.


My plan for post-high school is to go into Cyber Security, so it was a very pleasant surprise when Joomla and Drupal had security relevant settings, options, warnings, etc. It was just as disappointing when the cloud-based platforms had nothing to offer besides user accounts and passwords. The generic stuff. Not that that's unexpected, granted.

At the end of the day, the cloud platforms were the easiest to use, to setup, and the quickest. If you are willing to open your wallet up, they are perfect. For those who have some experience and are willing to spend some time to make a truly unique product, then the server based platforms are the ones you want. Wordpress is easy to recommend because of how widespread it is, but Drupal or Joomla are better if you are wanting something for a team.

If you feel like looking at any of the 6 more in depth, feel free to peruse the last handful of blog posts. Each are named thusly. Hope you enjoyed checking out my work & thoughts!

Senior Project; Weebly

Alright! This is my last blog post about a new platform; this week's being Weebly.

Weebly is yet another cloud based platform. Setup was very similar to the previous two, but with many themes that were also categorized and able to be freely browsed.

Also like the other platforms, editing the pages is extremely simple with drag and drop stuff from categories. Quite unlike the others, Weebly features 3rd party extensions and apps; even ones that are drag and drop. There is also support for youtube clips, misc files on your system, and file documents. Unfortunately, just like the other two, there is no CSS or HTML access. But most minor things can be fixed using Weebly.

Now, you may notice the lightning bolts above "audio" and "hd video". This brings me to the fairly negative part of Weebly: There are dozens of features that bring you straight to a paywall.
Almost exactly like a mobile game, there isn't a feature shown that just asks for money when you try to use it, and most of them don't express the fact that they are premium until after they have pulled you to the payment screen. It's a waste of time on the user's end and a waste of data.

Images let you upload your own, or browse the internet for specifically pictures on their own popup browser, which would add content to your website so that you don't have to worry about copyright stuff. They also offered pictures that were high-resolution, free of copyright, and professional; They were also 5 dollars a piece. For a picture. One of the ones I viewed was at a 2000x2000 resolution, which frankly isn't that high considering Wikipedia offers copyright free photos at up to 6000.

Weebly was really just frustrating in the end. It's a superior version of the other two platform's I used, but for a startup you really have to put money down for it be useful in the end. For 150 dollars for their "Pro" package, getting most of the premium features but without being too costly, for a freelance it isn't too bad if there is already some steady income. For a startup I would disagree, because it would be cheaper in the end to setup a free platform I covered earlier.

Weebly does offer pages that can be restricted either to users of the site or to members of the site administration, but it's also behind a paywall, and that's something Joomla and Drupal do for free.

Like the other two, this is the URL i set if you would like to browse what I toyed around with. As if a  final reminder, clicking "Continue" in the dialogue box that appeared would take me to a payment screen. You have to click that small little X in the top right corner to make this box go away.

The next time you hear from me I will compile my final thoughts on this project as a whole and on each platform vs eachother AND what is best for whom. That sorta thing.

Senior Project; Wix

Wix has basically floored me in comparison to Pagecloud, in part because of how little it's advertised compared to Pagecloud, and in part because it's a lot of what Pagecloud should be, and for free.

This wasn't particularly something that surprised me, but having an AI showing you how to change what you want for your website and cycle through some basic options until you find what you want can surely be helpful to anyone new to web design.

Something else that was pleasantly surprising was that, after choosing to make a blog, it offered several "themes" as different alternatives and examples to choose from. In addition, there were a few dialogue menus for choosing from specific options. I didn't see anywhere to change your mind after the website is created, but the choices are substantial ones with obvious answers. You either need them for what you are doing, or you don't.










The AI was surprisingly good; after my choice was made several similar varieties were offered, with the original 6 still there in case none of them fit.












Once everything was set up, Wix took me step by step through everything color, layout, and everything in between. Content was totally left to my discretion.

Each option stopped with dialogue similar to this; Wix was happy to show me how to do everything or to do it for me. Both options were similar, but Do It For Me did exactly as advertised; another great option for those not web-inclined.

After I was done, I messed around with sections and different page-related things. I was exceptionally pleased with the options for site-wide design, right alongside individual design. Each page can have a totally different color scheme and layout format, which while a terrible idea, is great that the option is there to use however.

The settings page is also impressive, featuring options for domain, site information, mobile responsiveness, and some security-related features, such as HTTPS. There are a few things behind a paywall, but for the most part most of Wix is totally free, easy to use, and great for startups.

With all of the good I have said about Wix, there are a few issues; you have no options from 3rd parties, such as extensions or plugins. In addition, you can't access the CSS or the HTML, or even the Javascript that Pagecloud allows you to access. Like Pagecloud, the platform seems geared towards small businesses, free lancers, or bloggers. Professionals looking for a platform for their website are better off with a platform that provides total freedom. Although, frankly, in the case of Wix there is enough freedom that you could use it instead of something else, for saving time both on setup and for the lack of updates that websites using lots of extensions do, plus the potential security issues that can follow along with them.

Wix all in all has been one of my favorites so far, but I look forward to seeing what's next.

Senior Project; Pagecloud

After realizing what a task Jekyll could be (given it required 4 different applications), I am presenting Pagecloud. It's fairly underwhelming, which is part of the reason why this is early. Actually, it's most of the reason. There was nothing for me to substantially mess with to make any major changes. Unlike anything so far, Pagecloud is rigidly set on being used for 1 of 2 things: businesses, or freelancers.

Pagecloud does not feature any downloadables; everything is done on it's website, online. In fact, if you go to this link in the next 11 or so days you can sort of browse what I threw together. As I've done with the last few platforms, my goal is to see how easy things are to set up, how effective they are with security, how easy it is to customize, and to present what I gather is what the platform is best suited for. Pagecloud leaves very little room for me to investigate most of these categories, which is disappointing, as it is the first platform that is subscription based.

Setup is the big thing that Pagecloud does well, along with customizing pages themselves.

This was after some messing around; its easy to drag and drop things right into your page, all premade with all the different layers easily editable, with options for every single object, as seen above. It's surprisingly easy to use, and it's all done in a web browser.

This was also a nice surprise; very easy switching between mobile and desktop views, with auto resizing for mobile view & warnings for changes made to the mobile view.
There are also guidelines for adding things; I wasn't able to get a screenshot showing these, because Command is one of the buttons needed to screenshot, and pressing it would make the guidelines go away; presumably it's a hotkey in Pagecloud to make things easier for you.

The guidelines help make things even, and its very easy to make links to anything, including emails or other websites. Unfortunately, that's about it on the good side of things. It's good that it's easy to add links and make things symmetrical, because everyone on the website is treated as a seperate object. The menu above had to be manually inserted, edited, set to a link, and set to go to the right page. And that's before I noticed that they feature the same thing on the bottom, too. There is no way to access the CSS and make pages site-wide, only page-by-page.

The closest you can get is javascript, but that is also on a page by page basis.

When adding a new page, you are able to browse all of the themes they have available; but they are all independent, and are all the same variations of "Home", "Contact", "Reviews", and "Prices". And if you add a page from a different theme it totally clashes with everything else you have. Frankly, they aren't themes, despite the name; they really should be called "Templates", because that's how they act. The screenshot above is from the "site settings" page; the "duplicate" option came from me clicking on the gear button, normally meant for, say, settings. It's a premium service that costs money and requires lots of manual work.

There are, additionally, no extensions to add or browse besides the javascript. My final thought is that this is a platform for ONLY businesses; maybe freelancers, but not web designers. Something better could be done with most of the other platforms, and bigger businesses might need the additional data ie page hits that this doesn't provide.

Senior Project; Joomla

Joomla has astounded me so far with just how easy it was to set up.

Most of my surprise comes from this page; after I finished installing it, I was presented with the screen above. Without any effort on your part, you have a great starting point for what you intend your website to do.

This is what I have after my experimenting and such. I focused much more on the system itself rather then how you can customize it's appearance.

One thing that I did like related to the appearance was how easy it was to add and customize menu's, including adding options that only certain groups could see. Such as above, where if a user is registered they have a link to "edit profile", or super users with "site settings". It's easy to add & change general layout stuff, and for some features it includes a WYSIWYG editor.

With articles, I enjoyed that it was easy to add/drag N drop images into articles, with the abiliy to resize them in the text box. You are also able to modify who can see what parts of the page, and there is a seperate tab for things like the author, meta data, hit count, and revision number. Something that bugged me, however, was that the default image insert dialogue box only gives you what's inside the site; you can't search through desktop folders. The upside is that it's not a big deal, and it's easy to just drag and drop what you want.







On the security side of things, I like that the site handles itself sort of like a network, with things like users and user groups. It's easy to set up several admins, and several types of admins, and for what sections, etc.

It also makes you relog every so often; I think about every hour, keeping things secure, and without that much of a bother. The site also features easy-to-setup 2 factor authentication. The funny inverse to all of this, is unlike both of the other sites I used, I set my username and password as "username" and "password" without Joomla batting an eye. Wordpress has you confirm it through a dialogue box and Drupal warns you.

Something else that I enjoyed, although this does not particularly make it stand out, is the sheer number of extensions. These are, so far uniquely, categorized and sorted for easy browsing.

Now, having said this, something that DID bug me was that they offer paid extensions. These are extensions that cost money, and then might not work, or might not be what you want, or down the road not need it anymore. It's a choice, but because of the optional paywall, the majority of extensions I saw were premium. Something else that bugged me was that they offered a "install from web" option, which didn't work. I'm not sure if it was because of MAMP, or some other local issue, but it offered no fixes either way.

Something else that was...intriguing, was the private message system.

This...seems totally pointless to me. If you have multiple users, then presumably they each have emails...what is the point of using a "private message" over an email? Email is more reliable and more personalized then an entirely new system that performs the same function. Convenience is the only explanation I can think of.

Semi-relatedly, you are able to mass email all of your users using Joomla. This is defenitely for convenience, and it actually is, as you dont have to hunt down all of the different emails each user uses; this tool already has all of them.

Templates, the main method of customzing Joomla, was nice because it focused on CSS, meaning it was easy to interpret as a web developer and modify yourself. There are also plenty of options that are normally lenghty to add to CSS, such as settings things as static vs fluid. 

The help page was very in-depth and semi-categorized. This sort of brings me to my conclusion about Joomla; this is a platform for small business owners, or independent artists, or other freelance-related jobs. Based upon the support for users, for communicating with them and for setting things that can be viewed by some user groups and others that can't, this is not meant for bloggers.
My issues were few, and overall I was satisfied with how Joomla worked. I am excited for checking the rest out!

Senior Project; Drupal

Moving right along, this week's alternative is Drupal.
It is far more complicated, and I won't lie, 1 week wasn't enough to learn all of the ins and outs. This is a far more comprehensive system, and also much more complex.

I spent nearly the entirety of Monday/Tuesday setting up Drupal and messing with themes. It was significantly harder to install then Wordpress, but that could be chalked up to not having any outside help. The time spent on the theme ended up being wasted, as I found a theme that worked right off the bat.

Not sure what's up with the missing pictures, but otherwise this layout is nicer in my opinion to the default.

The ease of customizability is fairly nice; I like that there are several default color sets, and on top of that it's easy to take a preset scheme and modify whatever you want, both with #FFF codes and a color wheel. 

The default format seems very geared towards bloggers, since all articles are by default posted in order from least recent to most recent. Pages, the other type of default content, aren't visible at all unless you either set them as "sticky" or promote them to the front page. I could not figure out how to place them elsewhere, but it would surprise me if that were not possible.

One of the things I appreciate with the articles is that they require alternate text. Normally something optional, it's a placeholder for slow connections or users with photos disabled. It was sort of a surprise. I also appreciate that it explains what exactly that is, because not all web developers may know that it's a thing.

Easily the biggest & best surprise was the security features of Drupal. On the Configuration page, I noticed the spooky red box above.

Surprise! I have security issues! This was sort of astonishing, as Wordpress had nothing of the sort that I could see. Not only does Drupal show you what you have wrong, it provides links to address the issues. Life would be so much easier if everything did this...

Back to the topic of configuration, I was overwhelmed b the number of different extentions that are installed by default, let alone the number on their website. This is really where only having 1 week shows itself, as I really can't tell you what most of these do.

Some of these, luckily, are fairly self-explanatory; things like "Toolbar", "Statistics", "Search", and "Responsive Image" are all helpful and easy to glance and enable.

The behind the scenes appearence was appealing and simplistic enough, but something else that surprised me was the fact that there were themes just for the behind the scenes stuff. It certainly helps lend all sorts of tools to gear it in different ways then the default blog sort-of style, and helps Drupal seem infinitely more appealing in my eyes.

The help page was surprising, not for the fact that it was present, but for the fact that it was far more streamlined then I had anticipated.

I think that pretty much cover's my thoughts and takeaways from Drupal. I can easily see this sort of engine being much more broadly useful and dynamic then Wordpress, although it's very hard to get into cold turkey. This is something that requires in depth reading, background knowledge, or even classes to get a handle on.
Now, time to explore something new and crazy.

Senior Project; Wordpress

Not quite a week, but close enough.
I'm already fairly well versed when it comes to Wordpress, having been using it off and on for a year, and this is the second time I've set it up locally (although truth be told I did need to look back on my old resources, but I didn't particularly need them in the end) but I guess this can be a "what is Wordpress", from the mouth of Morgan.

It seems to me to be geared towards bloggers mostly. There are ways to set up pages, but there are lots of settings related to blogging. Not that I mean ONLY bloggers can use it; companies such as Target, Disney, and Rovio use Wordpress.

On the customization side of things, which is likely why aforementioned companies use Wordpress, things are boundless. For as many apps there are on the iOS store or the Google Play store, there are just as many plugins, themes, widgets, and etc. for making Wordpress work for your goal. The defaults are surprisingly fine; the image above was made purely out of default images. Nothing outside of what you download is there.

This is how the customization tab, shown on each page of your site so you can easily change stuff that don't like right, without having to use the back arrow or finding it under the settings. It's a nice touch.

As for the themes, they are numerous, and it is incredibly easy to try something new.

From Appearance, you click Add New, and it brings up a browser for all of the different themes made by different people. It even features a "Preview" button, which displays a home page with the new theme. Click Install, and you can preview your own homepage in the new theme. Click Activate...

...and you are set.

All in all, Wordpress is a fair choice for any start-up developer or big time corporation, with options for both and with various knobs and buttons to use, making each version actually unique.

I look forward to seeing how Drupal works in comparison, and I look forward to reporting on my findings.

Senior Project; An Intro

So!
Senior stuff!
Actually, first, how have you been? It's been a while.
Things have been very busy.
We had some various projects, and I neglected to complete said projects as fast as others, resulting in total shock and terror when I discovered the deadline for eMagine entries was a week away.
Several days of staying after school for 2+ hours extra, while also working with my classmate Matthew, we got that out of the way and I gotta say, I'm pretty happy with what we got.
We also spent just a few weeks on Wordpress, something that last year I recall taking a few months. Finally, with the senior show around the corner, we all made business cards. It was very tempting to do one that had a hint of not-professional, but that didn't quite work out like I hoped.
So, finally, back to my original statement;
Senior stuff!
Me and all of the other seniors in Web (don't know about the other strands) are creating and completing various senior projects, to be updated every week. And this, technically, is my first update.

I was thinking about what I wanted to do my project about, and it took me a long time, but I randomly thought back to Wordpress. Why Wordpress?
I don't know that, but I do know that I don't know anything about alternatives. And that's what brings me to my project.
Each week I'm going to be setting up, using, and customizing a different version. The roadmap is re-going over Wordpress, and then I will be using Drupal, Joomla, Jekyll, Wix, and Pagecloud. And maybe in the order. After everything is said and done, I will evaluate each one compared to the other, and maybe figure out which one is best suited for what, how easy it was to set up and customize, and finally which one the average web developer should use.

Let's see how far this rabbit hole goes...