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Post launch review

Published on: 30 January 2011 and updated: 30 January 2011

I would like to thank everyone that took the time to checkout my new web site template. The feedback I received from Tweets, IM, text messages, IRC and email were really helpful.

Over 300 unique visitors took a look at the site on launch date. Almost 50% where from twitter which really inspires me to get writing about interesting stuff.

I'm going to take this opportunity to rant about the problems I've had over the last few days with the site, including RSS and Joomla 1.6.

RSS Implementation

An RSS feed for each category of my blog was in place. Users could drill down to the content they really wanted. I find this feature really useful on blogs I follow. I wish Freelance Switch implemented this strategy so I could follow just Freelance Freedom and not their crappy articles of lies.

You told me it was too complicated, so to keep things simple I've implemented an available feed page which clearly lists the available feeds. All "subscribe" links now point to this page.

Joomla 1.6

Here is a list of pros and cons I made over the last few days regarding Joomla 1.6:

Cons

  • Com_redirect doesn't detect the query string and only seems to work half the time
  • RSS setup doesn't make sense and is external to the CMS, read more link is also missing
  • Com content's safe HTML turned on in core is a real hassle. I like to make comments in my articles
  • Joomla Framework backward compatibility really impacts performance.

Pros

  • The inline html editor is awesome! Tag highlighing and tabbing.
  • The template system over rides are very powerful. Easy to make any design pixel perfect, also easy to implement multiple views that are slightly different. All without touching core code.
  • The new menu manager's multi level menus make subpage/category navigation really easy.
  • Multi level categories. I only use two levels of categories on this site, but will use more on other projects.

The most impressive part of Joomla is the framework. There is actually a underlying core MVC framework you can use without implementing all the CMS features. Great for small websites or web applications. I've now switched from CodeIgniter to Joomla's framework.

Special Thanks

So many people provided feedback over the last few days, thanks!