Site Admin Stuff 4 Noobs

[dm-horus]

Im pretty good at designing basic websites but this whole css/blog/cms thing is really new to me. im hoping the site i keep working on will be a testbed for me to learn more, but im afraid there isnt much you can teach yourself from scratch. most support forums are pretty uptight about helping strangers so im hoping the experts at opu can give me some advice. im curious about a few things...

ive tried more than half a dozen cms's since i got my subdomain and i have decided that a complete cms with wysiwyg editing is easiest right now while im still learning. that being said, what is a good content management system? ive used mambo, nucleus, drupal, a bunch of others that weighed in under 5mb, and have settled with joomla, the spiritual successor to mambo. the admin area looks almost identical to mambo and the overall functioning seems to be the same. it seems that an internal political battle forced most of the core team of mambo to fork the code to create joomla. since it happened to recently, the two are almost exactly the same. i did notice that joomla is about 3-5 megs smaller and the problems i encountered in mambo were more easily resolved in joomla. which leads me to my other query:

i uploaded joomla, set up the db and users, edited configuration.php, deleted the installation dir, set file permissions (CHMOD) and everything was set. however, none of the site images or formatting loaded. also, i experienced a problem which crippled my first iteration of my site under mambo - saving changes to config or applying content would not work. i assumed i hadnt set file permissions properly, so i went thru and gave everything 777 just to see if anything changed. nothing happened, same problems. so i read thru a troubleshooting forum and out of desperation hit reload again, and this time everything worked. the site is up and running and i am able to add content normally. when i used mambo, this problem never went away on its own and nothing i did to the backend helped matters. is there any reason why this would solve itself with joomla? did i simply have to wait while something was indexed serverside?

ive got a lot of questions and will likely have more as i continue to develop my site and teach myself more.

thx, guys n girls (?)

[Leviathan]

not sure about ur problem.

im just learning php/mysql also. gonna be making e-commerce site for univ.

[Mez]

Perhaps a piece of code to force a "refresh/reload" of the page  I had problems with it when using frames with mambo.  the frame prevented mambo from changing the look of the page i was viewing e.g. an admin log on.  the only way i could get round this was with a piece of code that set the site to have one frame and reloaded mambo in that one frame.

I had this problem as i was using a dot.tk redirect that actually opens your website in a frame so that it can display advertising on another frame above it.

Does this make any sense to you?
And i can't remember the piece of code i used, except it was a line or two of javascript, which i dont have any more

[Galactic]

A blog/css script I like is wordpress. http://www.wordpress.org/

As for your script problem. Im not really sure. I started learning php/mysql during my free time at the beginning of last semester so Im still a little weak. Mez might be right with the "refresh/reload" idea.

[dm-horus]

wordpress has some nice looking templates and would work well for a blog site, but im doing more than just a blog. the template im using for my site right now is actually a version of a wordpress scheme.