I’m a little annoyed at Joomla today. One of the ways in which pages are cre­ated on the site is by selecting what I call a view: a pre­de­ter­mined layout used by Joomla to dis­play arti­cles from a sec­tion or cat­e­gory. How­ever, for each cat­e­gory or sec­tion, there are really only two views to choose from. Nei­ther option is par­tic­u­larly compelling.

A quick search of the Joomla web­site did not help. It appears that there hasn’t been much work done to create addi­tional types of views that can be added as plug-ins. That likely means most of the work on this problem has been done on an indi­vidual basis by PHP devel­opers putting together Joomla sites for sin­gular pur­poses. These are the people that must be sought out for their knowl­edge and inspiration.

I asked the oracle for a gift of said wisdom and the oracle gave me this web­site: The Art of Joomla. The site is authored by self-proclaimed Joomla master Andrew Eddie. I don’t say this in jest. As far as I can tell, he is a Joomla master, and I must now become the stu­dent. I am for­tu­nate that there are those people out there willing to share the wisdom they have gained through expe­ri­ence. Hope­fully, this will result in improve­ments in my Joomla website.