I remember the days. I worked straight HTML. I wrote like a mad man. Lived the ultimate off-road lifestyle and documented the insanity by means of a camera, a keyboard and often times a satellite internet connection. Those were the days of Off-Road.com. There were editorial days that existed long before the ORC era of my life, but they do not size up to the workload, responsibility nor adventure.

Traffic at ORC was ultimately bolstered by informative and often humor-laced excitement. And during that era of my life, it was far more difficult to web publish that excitement as it is today. Straight HTML via notepad and then manually publishing links via FTP file upload for an array of primary directory pages was an extremely tedious task. Homesite soon eased the HTML editing woes but also inserted erroneous code. Fortunately, Macromedia Dreamweaver segued onto the scene has long proven to be a standard asset in my code-slinging repertoire.

Years later, the web is now dynamic and virtually automagic. And I’m off in the land of Joomla content management systems. For a while, this was a great boost to performance and satisfied the objective of purely editorial efforts. But as the days drive on, I have realized my prose has wandered into the irritation of Joomla’s inhibiting content management system. Like I said in a recent post, Joomla is more of an extensible web software framework than a CMS, since it is quite complicated to management and even publish content using Joomla.

Having migrated to Wordpress, writing is once again addictive. There are a multitude of other commercial and open source blogging applications as well as hosted applications I have used in the past. But with Wordpress, I am again on the verge of navigating into my element. And I’d hate to divert my efforts from the affliction.

But, as content is the driving force behind one of my personally-owned Joomla websites, I need to figure out an integrated option, since Virtuemart e-commerce is a major money maker for the retail sales segment of the site, and I cannot do away with the cash machine. There are other operational money makers integrated into the site as well, specifically the photo gallery, which conducts sales and reels in a considerable amount of targeted traffic. The photo gallery, which is an integrated Gallery 2 and soon to be Gallery 3 install, produces healthy e-commerce photography sales on certain occasions, despite the army of flatbiller photographers who are now photographing average off-road race and posting them online these days.

The point is, I have an arsenal of tech stories and industry insights for this site that is geared toward off-road, outdoor, 4X4, automotive and powersports markets. I also love to rant and rave about applicable lifestyle topics that inevitably includes politics. Some are simply average tech but nonetheless enhanced by the fun factor. Others are liable to knock the kneecaps off of a few industry nitwits who have overstepped their efforts of inept corruption and all-around stupidity.

Anyhow, the site content has become relatively dormant or at best inconsistent. One of the reasons for this is the migration from Joomla 1.0 to Joomla 1.5, which created a whole host of issues, including SEO and integration issues. But amid the biggest reasons for content abandonment is the content management and content delivery system itself. Joomla seems to have evolved into a worse solution than in the recent Joomla 1.5 offering, which is referenced in blog posts here as well as forum posts I have made elsewhere upon the web.

Because of the integrated e-commerce and photo-commerce requirements, a non-bridge or integrated Wordpress content management system is out of the question. Wordpress would definately lessen the load on management and improve production but would require extensive effort elsewhere to maintain the current traffic trends as relative to sales. With that said, I’m really beginning to think Joomlaworks K2 CCK is the most viable means of achieving my objective. It required only five minutes to download, install and import all content and categories. In depth configuration is yet another story but projected to require a week’s work to achieve near perfection, where an army of dynamic applications are integrated to include news and blog search RSS feeds,  real-time search application widgets and an integrated display of applicable product and product categories, which are categorized in an intuitive manner that mirrors the e-commerce shopping cart category structure.

Well, I’ve got to get on with the configuration of a pending project’s price file import. Until then, careful consideration is underway, and the world of social media still remains, own or be owned.