The Bernard Community Center is a converted all-black school, O.H. Bernard School, that was purchased by dedicated alumni. To preserve important memories and serve the community, the group formed a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization to establish a community center for Centerville and Hickman County, Tennessee. Several considerations must be made when designing a website suitable for the group's noble objectives.

We've come a long way, Baby! Not many people remember going into debug mode to figure out how to make some formatting changes in WordSmith, an ancient word processor. WordPerfect, Microsoft Word, MacWrite, and other tools, like laser printers, emerged to create documents better than typewriters. Still, documents were like traditional, typewritten documents. Then came desktop publishing. The Internet and www finally appeared.

Early web pages were still much like typewritten documents with some graphics pasted in and hyperlinks tying together a slew of related HTML documents. Borning by today's standards.

Desperate for a non-technical solution for regular people, I led a team to create a prototype content management system. Users could write a Microsoft Word document, save it as HTML, and upload it. Our tool fixed the crappy HTML rendered by Microsoft Word and posted it to a central server. The trouble was that we were too early in the technical cycle to get people (management) to understand the potential. Soon afterward, I was a project manager given the task of putting the policy documents of my agency, NRCS/USDA, up on the Internet for public access. I found a commercial tool that helped us manage the documents, but it was primitive. Nevertheless, it continued to run without maintenance (the product was bought and shelved by a large corporation) for several years after my retirement.

After retirement, I kept my skills sharp by building and maintaining a few XHTML-based websites. Then, I discovered Joomla 1.0. Desktop publishing for the web! The funny thing is that we were still mostly bound up in the traditional document layout: A hierarchical, database-structured view of documents presented with menus to documents in specific categories. It was much better than writing XHTML, and then there was CSS styling--a remarkable improvement on style sheets from word processing documents and inline formatting of HTML.

With JoomShaper's SP Pagebuilder, the paradigm shifted back to a page-based system. Built on top of Joomla's structure, the core components were integrated into page layouts. Rather than loading and positioning modules in predefined blocks of the template, PageBuilder offered built-in elements to replace many modules. We could install conventional modules in pages at many locations, not just those predefined in the templates.

After multiple upgrades, PageBuilder is at version 5.4. I've seen nothing that really compares well to it.

Part II: Things I've learned that help make using PageBuilder easier.

This is a collaborative blog post. Pat's additions are shown in brackets, and the text is italicized.

I have a good friend in the adjacent county that is an excellent, experienced Joomla website developer, Pat Vanden Bosche. She recently completed a redesign of the Lobelville, TN, website. Lobelville is pretty progressive for a small community that is little more than a village in rural, often depressed, Perry County. Our local mayor noted Lobelville's strategic move and asked Pat for a quote. They agreed quickly.

The bulk of what appears below was written by ChatGPT. Good reasons, all. But, that's not really the reason I use Ubuntu Linux.

Years ago when Windows 8 appeared, I considered it to be a disaster. Microsoft had gone off the deep end with their concept of a user interface. Things that used to be simple got complicated. I was very tired of having to reinstall Windows after some period of time; Windows got slower and slower; malware was a constant threat. While I learned to troubleshoot Windows pretty well, fixing it was never that easy.

There is a plugin for ChatGPT for Joomla and the JCE editor.  Here is the output from a command I gave the plugin: 

Write 300 words about using joomla as the preferred content management system for a small business or non-profit organization

Getting someone to light on your website is a lot like baiting flies with honey. We use colors that fit the emotions and interests of people you want to bring into your website. The wrong colors are like vinegar to flies.

While previous steps depended largely on listening to your client, asking the right questions, and discovering what the client doesn’t always know he needs, it’s time now to synthesize—put it together.

In part 1 of Thinking Things Through, I described some of the methodologies I’ve used for software development. When I Google “website development methods,” what I see from multiple companies are variations on one or more of the software development methods. Usually, they look like a typical waterfall process. Snip the circle, straighten the circle into a line, and you have the waterfall process.

Before jumping on a server or your own workstation, take the time to create a plan. Don't get hung up on creating a plan document. Creating a plan is about planning, not writing. Know what you are going to do, how you're going to do it, where you're going to do it, and how and when you will involve your client.