Uploading Joomla kasiegigs.co.za

A friend of mine (VJ) introduced me to some Content Management System (CMS) called Joomla a while back. I’m assuming anyone reading this has some knowledge of what a CMS is, so I won’t go into details about what this Open Source jewel can do. Back then I played around with it and set up an intranet for company x. That was the most I did… so I can’t claim guru knowledge of the platform. When I decided to put kasiegigs.co.za in motion, Joomla was my first choice to help me realize the dream.

I managed to set up my site with not much hassle on my local machine. All was cool until I had to upload the site to a web server. It seems like ISPs/hosting companies in South Africa are not too familiar with these CMSs. I looked around for a while for a reasonably priced hosting package that included Joomla as a feature. Most geeks would say any company that offers php, mysql and apache should suffice. For a neophyte like me, a package that comes readily configured for me to just copy and paste my local site to the server is the only way. Most companies from overseas offer this and the most geeky stuff one would do is upload the mysql database.

I finally opted for sadomain.co.za… not to say that they gave me the configuration bypass. They have a Joomla package though. I uploaded my local site to the server space they gave and loaded the database using phpMyAdmin… but nothing worked. After a few hours of googling I found a very nice blog/article that highlights some minor configuration changes I needed to make to get things working.

So if you’re a newbie and want to get a Joomla site working remotely, here’s a link to the article that got me going:

http://www.dart-creations.com/joomla/joomla-tutorials/uploading-joomla-to-your-web-server.html

Happy Joomling!

What is kasiegigs.co.za?

Kasiegigs.co.za is a social photography concept that I’ve been holding back on since my varsity days. Back then, I came across a couple of gig guides and social photography websites that I found interesting. None had been centered around townships or the kasie social scene though. So I came up with the idea of setting up a social photography and gig guide specifically targeted at townships in and around Gauteng.

It’s been a rough ride as I’m not a specialist web developer and am not too sure of the profits I’ll be looking at at this stage. I’ve set up the framework and gone through the whole process of domain registration and hosting. For now I’ve just put up the base functionality with not much content. This includes the photos gallery, contacts page and news platform. My next task is the about us page and then a couple of pages on places you can visit ekasie.

You can check out this work in progress at www.kasiegigs.co.za.

The kasiegigs.co.za trip starts here

Two nights ago I attended a Netweb Event. This is a monthly talk and networking meet-up hosted by an entrepreneur called Mongezi Mtati. I think I mentioned him in previous posts and expressed my reverence for him. He got me again! I left the event with a lump in my throat. When I walked in, I chose a seat in a corner not knowing that that’s exactly where I was meant to be for the duration of the event: in a corner assimilating knowledge. Those guys made me realize how many things I had been doing wrong and I was humbled. Amongst others, I met Gareth Knight from oneafrikan.com, Nikki Viljoen and Doug Vining from Blue Catalyst. These guys have been in the game for a while and have interesting profiles/history behind them. You should google them when you get a chance.

I learned tons of things, but one item that struck me most was "always blog about your business". The Gareth guy made an example of how it worked for him. There was a product he’d been developing and blogging about at the same time. Without him knowing, there had been an investor that was following his blog and by the time he met the investor they were on the same page. It didn’t take much from him to convince the guy to sign a cheque…. figuratively as Gareth put it

So from here on you’ll see a clone of the idea. Hopefully, this will get Mr Motsepe to fund my idea the next time I meet him. The concept I’ll be rambling on about going forward is kasiegigs.co.za…