Joomla anyone?
 

I just downloaded Joomla and I just don't get it. Seems like an unorganized web creater. Anyone have any luck with it? Is is a waste of my time?

Thanks so much

Gabby

it's eye candy..thats it.

I tried it and really wanted to get it to work.... but it's buggy and not very secure. IMO Don't waste your time. ;)

Thanks Guys

I just uninstalled it. I thought it was very unorganized and unclear.

Gail

Ya' know, i was just toying with it the other day... but it looks like vBAdvanced is still better for vB than Joomla is.
It COULD get better, but at the time vBAdvanced CMPS is the best out there.

Yes I was just looking a VBA a few minutes ago. Do you think a newbie can learn it?

Thanks
Gabby

It's easy... you don't even have to learn anything... it's just plain simple.

I have used Joomla for years. Its what powers my .com page.

I also use vba for forum stats etc and to create pages and have the modules side bar. VBA is way more then just a portal page. In fact its the least important reason I use it. LOL

Joomla, to me is a very powerful resource once you get to use it. Its very flexible and the only problems I have ever had was an exploit with a plug in. You know what they say about those. haha Its not very user friendly on the admin side... there is a learning curve but once you get that down the possibilities become endless with it.

I bought a plug in that connected it to my vb database but I had to disable the vb registration and use the joomla one. I didnt like that so I just gave up on it for now.

Tried it back when it was Mambo.. Didn't like it.

It split off and became Joomla and was supposed to be easier. Tried the 1.5 version and didn't like it. Moreover didn't want to spend the learning curve on how to use it or spend hundreds of dollars for the addons needed to do what I want. Someone will say there are free addons but none of the ones I tried work or they were complete garbage that looked like they were coded by a 3 year old. Only addons that seem to work are the expensive ones. One company wanted $150/year to add a recipe database to a site. I would have been willing to pay $50.00 if it was good but not $150.00.

Anyway, after Joomla, tried Drupal. It was better. More modules and more were free. However the 5.X system is a hell of a pain to style whereas 6.X didn't have the modules and had an inefficient menuing system that caused hundreds of queries if you wanted to use custom menus. Actually thousands of queries with the menu setup that I had. Somehow menus with 24 categories with 8 primary and an average of 3 secondary categories each resulted in 5800 queries on page view in the 6.X version whereas it was only 120 queries per page in the 5.x series. Developing and using Drupal on the site would have also required too much maintenance as there is a security notification at least every 3 days and you need to know PHP.

Then I tried Wordpress. Most will tell you this is a just a blogging platform. But if it is only a blogging platform, it is the most powerful one in the world today. With some theme changes and maybe a couple of addons you can turn it into a powerful CMS as well. Themes are easy to manipulate even with little knowledge of PHP. You can do most of it right in a single CSS file though there are thousands of free and commercial themes available off the shelf. From there you can add widgets, plugins and template filters to make it do what you want. A magazine site that I worked on for 6 months in Drupal, took 6 hours to replicate with Wordpress and that included reading the documentation, downloading the software and figuring out how to use widgets and plugins. The only issue with Wordpress is that its user permission system is a little lacking off the shelf because it wasn't meant to be used by multiple users. Luckily there are a couple of plugins that can fix this in about 30 seconds for you. Literally 30 seconds from download to live on the site with the new version.

Anyway... Drupal shows potential and the big push with development is to make it usable by common people. I continue to follow the project. However Wordpress stands out and can handle a wide variety of sites. Even has a vBulletin bridge available on this site. The power of Wordpress is often overlooked because it is a "Blogging" platform.

Joomla is a time waister in my opinion. I prefer wordpress.
Joomla is too unorganised and hard to find your way about. Way tomany options in menus but mostly for the same thing lol!

I've heard a lot of good about wordpress, just haven't had any incentive or need to switch as I can get around joomla really well. If Joomla stops working for me, it will be likely the first thing I try. :)

I'm curious on how the vBulletin made CMPS will look like.
Will it be free or a paid add-on?

There is a video of some of its features in development at vb.com on the developers blog.

Free? I doubt that LOL.

I use Joomla on many of the sites I have designed. We use it for our school disctrict. My largest complaint about it is in the ACL, there is just no way at this time to control permissions and create usergroups but that is supposed to change in 1.6, it better or else I will be looking for a new option. There is a steep learning curve on the admin side of things but once you get it down it's a piece of cake to do just about anything with it. I love it but as it is with anything, there are some areas that really need improvement. With jfusion really cranking along it is definitely gonna make it even more powerful!!

However, if you are just designing a simple content site it is a bit overkill. If you are looking to have a lot of features and addons then I would definitely check it out. I will never use it for just a simple website.

As far as it being organized, I think it is well organized as there are really three main parts to it, components, modules, and articles. Each section is easy to use and navigate but again, that is once you get down what each of those are and how to use it!!

How so? There's one "page.tpl.php" file and the rest is css. Of course if you're making a massive site, there's quite a bit more to it than just that.. but with core that's all there is.

I'll be the first to admit that the generated code by Drupals third party modules (especially the Views module) is a disaster though.. and you typically can't create a Drupal site (with a lot of modules) without having a huge mess of css. But I think compared to vB's style / template system, Drupal is 10 times less time consuming. Maybe not "easier" per-say, but that depends on your knowledge with php.

I'll agree with you on Wordpress though. Most of the sites that my job does for people can be done easily with WP.. Like 95% of them, anyways.

Well core has absolutely no functionality except for taxonomy, urls and basic content management. If you want custom content types with fields and different views, you need to install at least three plugins (CCK, Views, Panels) to get it to work right or write a lot of PHP code yourself. If you're going to re-write most of the content handling why use a CMS to start with. This doesn't even touch on elements needed if you want to have basic social networking components included on the site. That is probably another 5 or 6 plugins right there because the basic user profile is just that, basic.

Then you need to make sure that all modules and styles inherit the output properly, etc... This is probably why the commercial version of Drupal, Acquia includes 20 third-party modules to provide the basics people need. Probably also why CCK and Views will be absorbed into Drupal 7 as core components.

I guess if you're making a simple blog site with just one author and basic comments then you can simply edit page.tpl.php. Most sites that need a CMS are more complicated than that though. Of course in the long run it does mean that most Drupal sites are less cookie cutter than many Wordpress or even vBulletin sites. They do take a lot more investment to get working though.

Joomla is hacker bait. Installing that script is like posting a big sign that says "Please hack my site".

Some of the add-ons that you can download from the joomla site has been tagged as having known security flaws. But the joomla community still hands those files out like candy.

Awhile back the joomla developers did not want the script tied in with anything that cost money. SMF even dropped support for the joomla & smf bridge because of the stuff that the joomla devs were doing. I think this was about a year and a half ago. But the joomla community lost a lot of respect and support because of what they "thought" open source meant.

The joomla support forums are a joke. If you need help, instead of asking, get ready to beg for help.

The code is bloated and slow.

The list goes on and on.

I ran a joomla site for about 6 or 7 months. It was probably one of the worst experiences of my web site building career.

Agree with everything said, Joomlas interpretation of the GPL is incredibly self indulgent.

It's Joomla who dropped using SMF . Joomla always wanted to be open source based system, SMF is no more open source thats why they moved to Phpbb actually.

I did many joomla sites, Many clients are happy with Joomla . it's not actually that bad nor its slow actually depends on people, if one is in need of medium kind of site with some small traffic and community joomla is pretty good . but if you are targetting for making a big site why not invest money and hire a coder.

I have been on joomla from 4years now i never felt support forum so as u mentioned. I am now on my own for joomla modifications and all . Just takes a bit time but its worth running Joomla for small sites.