I’m learning Chi­nese. I’m also learning Joomla. Com­bining the two, I am cre­ating a web­site using Joomla to doc­u­ment my expe­ri­ence learning Chi­nese. This is one of the rea­sons why my blog posts have been so rare lately. Not the only reason, but one.

I’ve been putting a lot of time into the new site lately – more time that I should have spent. How­ever, I finally have a design and I’ve finally fig­ured out a few things about Joomla tem­plates. The one problem with Joomla is that doc­u­men­ta­tion is non-existent. I thought Drupal was bad. Drupal has been through enough iter­a­tions now that I can usu­ally do a google search when I have an issue and someone’s already found an answer. Joomla appears to be much younger. Con­se­quently, everyone else is also trying to figure it out.

Over the last few days, in addi­tion to cod­i­fying my new site design, I have suc­cess­fully (if only par­tially) dis­man­tled one of the default tem­plates, strip­ping it down to some of the bare essen­tials I will need for my new site. I don’t need much, really. Just a few regions defined, a simple menu setup, and basic styles. Today I will begin adding images and CSS. Hope­fully, in the next week or so, I will have the site func­tioning on a basic level. Then I can once again work towards the orig­inal goal of learning a new language.