It's 2016. You can't just go out and produce porn without having to deal with a host of additional tasks. Many of them didn't exist only a couple of decades back.
One of them is creating a website to inform your audience and possibly allow for member registration. Community is quite the word, on the internet, possibly to compensate for the lack of it in the real world, where 1% of the population owns more than the other 99%. So I went out & installed Joomla, an open source CMS. It's not the first time I've done this but, to be honest, after working for a university creating high end 3d virtual learning environments for some 8 years, I didn't think I'd have to track back this far.
Joomla was a nuisance so I installed Drupal. Another open source CMS. Drupal was a nuisance as well so I un-installed both, checked on-line for a bit and installed Joomla again, but now the current version. And I set out to get myself a decent template, mess around with it and produce something that doesn't make your eyes bleed. That was Sunday, at around 8 in the morning. Now it's Monday and 9.47 in the morning. I did sleep some by the way.
But I did manage to pull it off. It's not perfect, especially the photo gallery plugin is rather crappy but I tried 3 different modules or extensions and I got fed up with it. After all, I want to produce a game, not a flawless image browsing site. So it's running two galleries, the third got deleted because it was one of those traps where only core functionality is included but to make it actually do anything useful you'll have to pay for the extensions that are required. Which leads me to the ecosystem I again had to navigate: Open Source Software (in this case Content Management Systems). I've been through those hills many times before.
The thing is, all of it is free, free as in freedom. Free as in Infuriating. Which doesn't mean it comes without a cost because frustration is also a price to pay. But in many cases you don't, in the grand scheme of things, pay for the software, the product. You pay for the knowledge about it. So it's never Joe Random Sixpack intuitive. You can figure it out if you spend the time on it, have the patience for a lot of trial and error and resolution to trawl through tens of forum pages where the same problem you bumped into is discussed but the answer doesn't work because it's another version running on another server with another configuration file in another location. Stuff like that. The more preceding knowledge you have, the faster this process is. If you've got none, you're in for some serious suffering. Although, and I have nothing to gain from stating this, am not affiliated -yet?-, my hosting provider comes with a seriously outstanding dashboard, that indeed just lets you install all these content management systems and required databases with the click of a mouse. It's using an installer called softaculous and if you've installed an Apache or PHP on *anything* a server before, you know that saves tons and tons of time. So, if you ever consider an adult site, I'd recommend Site Valley.
So here's the thing with all these content management systems. Nobody actually *wants* to make it so that Joe Random Sixpack can intuitively, easily understand it, install it, configure it, tweak it to perfection for their own individual and personal needs. That would kick the legs from under the chair this ecosystem sits on. You pay for the knowledge (or for the time it saves you when somebody has it already and you don't want to invest it in learning it). It's indeed a knowledge economy so some resources are harder to mine than others. Sure, it can still be done and I'm not objecting to it in principal. I still think it a better system than proprietary software, which boils down to pretty much the same thing but without the freedom to mess around with it yourself if you're so inclined and capable to. I'd be no less frustrated and irritated with a commercial provider because nothing is ever exactly how I want it and tweaking is inevitable. Commercial software provides another, additional reason te be infuriated: and I *pay* you for this? You motherfucking cunts!
Now, the example above, is an example of this ecosystem in optima forma. Softaculous performs a service for Site Valley, Site Valley combines this with others to perform a service for me at very reasonable costs. Companies like xswebdesign, which provided a free template that required minimal messing around with to give a good first result performs a service for businesses who can't be arsed to do it themselves and don't mind providing the source for the few and far between who do open the hood and tweak the engine. And everybody is happy.
But if Apache and PHP were easy as a breeze to install, Softaculous wouldn't have a business. If Joomla and Drupal were easy as a breeze to install, configure and customise web design companies wouldn't have a business. So there's bottlenecks, and they exist by mutual, subliminal understanding. It's all good and fine, as long as you can understand it, deal with it, and manage the mess that squeezing through those bottlenecks, like forcing thick hard shit through a thin pipe, generates.
So, long story short. I got it done and would like to hat-tip once again to the entire open source community, Joomla and Drupal in particular (I'm now determined to brush up my Drupal current knowledge with the next site I'll build, a sister where I'll publish my stand alone CGI) and especially again xswebdesign because that's a damned sexy template.
Oh, you can my first result here. It's no porn unless you opt in for it and register. Not bad for a Sunday, eh?
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