At last, time to build instead of time to repair

The basic content is finally up and running. The craft store, the multilingual pages, and a forum meant to be a shared place for makers around the world. The shape that lived in my head for years is now, at least in outline, there on the screen.

Since Joomla 6, what I wanted to do has finally become possible. That is not only because there are more features. What changed is where my time goes.

From Joomla 2.x through 5, I braced myself for every update. Had something broken? Had the extensions kept up? Was the layout still holding together? Fix one thing and another appeared. Most of my working hours disappeared into repairs like that. With Joomla 6, that time has shrunk remarkably. The hours it frees up go straight into the work I actually wanted to do. After nearly ten years of using Joomla, this was both a surprise and a plain pleasure.

Earlier this year I also gave up one project completely and let it go: a site built on the Japanese-language domain "akita-ken.com". I had held that domain for close to twenty years, and I released it in early spring.

The reason is simple. The time was gone. Running the craft store was one thing; taking on a shared site and a forum for makers worldwide, single-handed, left no room anywhere to add "akita-ken.com" on top. Telling people about Akita as it is today is certainly work worth doing. But many others are already doing it. I decided it was not a place for me to take on, given how often I have to lie down and rest.

A shared site and forum for makers around the world, on the other hand, was something that sounded as though it must already exist, and yet I could not find it. That was exactly what I had felt was missing all the years I ran the craft store. Not selling material and stopping there, but a place where people teach one another how to weave and can ask about whatever they do not understand. Being able to give that missing piece a real form, all of it, with Joomla 6, is something I expect to build on from here.

Japanese information sites often say that with Joomla you can run a blog, several languages, a forum and a store. But honestly, I have never seen a site that has all of those running at once. It is easy to say Joomla is good. Operators who have actually done the work and have every part of it running are, I suspect, very few.

How you use a given extension comes down to taste in the end. So unless I find myself with a great deal of spare time, I do not plan to write up the steps on a blog. What matters far more to me is that the hours I longed to stop spending on repairs can now be spent on making content.

So yes: my "project" has stopped being a story I tell myself and become something I move forward, patiently, in the real world.