Another website done...

Roger, a friend of mine at church, is a minister to the homeless. He went to seminary a few years back...he can now be called Pastor Roger.

Roger and Ronald Nitz, a pastor from Holy Trinity Church in Portland, are starting a new worship community, a "koine'" community, in Portland.

A week ago Friday I met with Roger for lunch. He wanted a website. He has reserved the domain names koinecommunity.org and koinecommunity.com. He knows that I do the website for our church, Resurrection Lutheran Church at rlcpdx.org. He wanted to see what I could do for them. I told Roger I could set a Joomla site for them.

Roger emailed me content and pictures...makes setting up a website much easier. All went smooth except for a couple days ago when I logged out of the admin area...and the site was blank. I spent a day sorting through this problem. I googled and found there was a bug in the latest version of Joomla that was causing this to happen. I read through a huge thread on a joomla discussion board, and I replaced three of the php files...bug "hotfixes". Still, this site would not come up.

I started a new joomla site, very reluctantly. I was afraid the same error I was having in the first site would happen in the second site. I proceeded to copy files from the new site to the first site - the hot fixes were not working anyway.

I noticed something different between the two directories where the joomla sites are stored. The permissions on the first directory were tighter than the permissions on the second site. I must have changed then permissions, but I don't know how. A changed the permissions back...and the website came up again. I was so happy!

The website is here. The last challenge was to change the color of the template to match Roger's blog. I had to dig through the template files to find the graphic that made up the top of the website template. It was a small rectangle divided into three differently colored sections. The rectangle is repeated across the top to form the template. I used the rectangle and paint fill tools to change the colors. To find out the colors from Roger's blog, I viewed the source code to find out the color codes.

A lout of work...I know...but it worked!

The last step is to forward the domains to where the website is stored on my host. The domains are currently registered through Network Solutions. I was going to do the forwarding for Roger, but they charge $12 per domain per year to do this. I was surprised, because Godaddy does not charge for this. I researched the two companies. Network Solutions has been around since 1979...the beginning of web time. Godaddy started in 1997. The two are the biggest companies in the biz. It would be cheaper to transfer the domains from Network Solutions to Godaddy and then do the forwarding. I sent all this in an email to Roger. He's probably scratching his head.

Nothing in webdesign is ever simple!