K2 Extension for Joomla

Yesterday I got an answer in the Joomla forums that recommended K2 as a solution for the personalized blog aspect ot my site. The demo video on the K2 site got me intrigued. It had all the kinds of things most blogs need such as socialbookmarking, tag clouds (although not as nifty looking as Joomulous), and commentary complete with CAPCHA. Overall, K2 acts like a mini-Joomla inside Joomla.

Speaking of that, it was nice that the categories I could set for my blogs could be seperate from the sections/category madness of the original in-the-box Joomla. Overall, it helped me decrypt some of the logic behind the Joomla interface that drives me crazy. Yes, Drupal spoiled me with how changes for something are always in one single place.

I am still left with a few questions and things to troubleshoot:

• Can I promote featured K2 items to the front page? Where does the category template "blog" comes from? How do I add more? (see screenshot below)
• Glitch: Social bookmarking symbols dont show up even if I have enabled them
• Glitch: Clicking on a K2 item's individual page leaves me with an entry devoid of a stylesheet. This happens no matter which of the Joomla starter templates that I use. (see screenshot below)

Still want to give this extension a chance. It might be the closest to blogging Im going to get.

No Drupal For the Code Cat, Back to WordPress

After things fell apart with the Drupal project that I was into, I had a week of distraction followed by starting back up on a Wordpress Template project.

While I know many Wordpress Template creators that base their template off of someone's pre-existing one, I wanted to start from scratch since I only need a very simple template anyway. Besides, I never know how to gauge how original your template is from complex one you based yours off of. After a while all Wordpress templates probably can start looking alike from one artist to another's.

Almost everything of mine is done. Now all that remains is cleaning up the CSS before getting it transfered to a live website. CSS cleanup can be like cleaning your room. You have to clean out the code you dont need as well as get some of the like objects to be placed together. I have found some useful links that discuss this very thing:

5 Steps to a More Organized Style Sheet
11 Useful Tools to Check, Clean and Optimize your CSS file
10 Best CSS Practices to Improve Your Code