Easter weekend didn’t start well - I decided to upgrade Joomla on one of my sites to version 1.5.1 from 1.0 and upgrade just totally ruined the entire site - content was lost, template wasn’t compatible with version 1.5.1. At first I thought that the reason is Dreamhost’s automatic one-click upgrade that I used, but even after manual reinstall Joomla kept giving weird “Fatal error: Call to a member function name() on a non-object in helper.php on line 219″ error in Control Panel, and legacy mode for old template didn’t work.

(To be fare I should say that Dreamhost provides excellent value for money. If you are looking for a good hosting - use IVANKUZNETSOV promocode and get a $50 discount when setting up an account on Dreamhost)

A thought of reinstalling all modules and reconfiguring Joomla from scratch was simply too depressive, so I decided to try another CMS. As a Ruby on Rails convert and a strong believer in open-source ideology I decided to go for Radiant - open-source CMS written in RoR. It is still in beta (latest release is 0.6.4), but it is surprisingly stable and powerful. Take a look at the footer of www.ruby-lang.org - official Ruby programming language web site - it is powered by Radiant

Installation of Radiant was rather easy - thanks to this guide and my prior experience with RoR applications deployment on Dreamhost. It took me a couple of hours to figure out how to actually create sites with Radiant - there are not that many tutorials available yet, so it is pretty much  “make by example”. Split into pages, snippets and layouts makes a lot of sense onse you get your head around it.

From my experience Joomla is an overkill for most of the small sites, and despite being WYSIWYG, it still requires a professional or at least a tech savvy to configure it. After Radiant is set up and configured it is no more difficult to add content there than to edit a wiki page because of its Textile support. But it is so much simpler and easier to use than Joomla.

I managed to restore the ruined site in a day’s time - fetched most of the lost content from Google cache, converted Joomla template into Radiant’s layouts and recreated the pages (well, it was a small site after all). First time I dealt with Joomla - I spent several days trying to figure out where are the settings that I actually need in the endless menus.

Radiant is clearly following “less is better” principle. If you want to try Radiant - there’s a live demo where you can do whatever you want with the content.

I bought myself a new laptop - Lenovo T61 (15.4″ WSXGA+ TFT, Intel GMA X3100 GM965 integrated graphics, 100Gb 7200rpm HDD, 2Gb RAM, Core 2 Duo T7500 2.2GHz CPU, integrated bluetooth, Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG). I was really tempted by MacBook Pro, but Lenovo with similar configuration was almost twice as cheap, and still provided everything I need. And after all what is the point of running Linux in Parallels on Mac, when you need to develop for Maemo?

Unfortunately when I bought it in February there was no option to get it without Vista preinstalled, so the first thing I had to do was to install the proper OS. Now Lenovo offers an option to get T-series laptops with SUSE Linux preinstalled.

Ubuntu 7.10 installation worked as a dream - I didn’t have to hack anything at all - everything worked out of the box. Of course I had to configure the system to my needs, but user interface was sufficient for that.

Looking forward to Ubuntu 8.04 release now: