Kenneth Ismert
kismert at gmail.com
Fri Jan 14 14:25:02 CST 2011
> > Jim Lawrence: ...Joomla is the best web template designer and application > developer, bar none... > I used Joomla extensively for about 3 years, using it in a business that sold web-based apps. Joomla does have a good template designer. You can fairly easily go from HTML mockup to functioning Joomla template. The 1.5 template system lets you override various aspects of the system, which allows you to keep all template-related changes in one directory, but I found their mechanism clunky. It is hard to beat for the number and variety of add-ons, plug-ins and utilities you can download. But, don't expect complete 'mix-and-match' for presentation-layer add-ons. Quality is very mixed -- a whole lot of add-ons look like 'my first PHP project' when you read the code. It has a huge online community, and with effort, you can find the answer to nearly any question. As far as an application developer product, that's a mixed bag too. The latest version has very good documentation, and an online code browser, but the API tends to have a lot of historical relics. It would be a lot of effort to extend Joomla at it's basic level. The process for making add-ons is well-documented. > ... Is Joomla a very good web based application framework? ... > No. If you want a real framework, get something like Ruby on Rails or Django. My biggest beef with the Joomla model is their arbitrary division of add-ons into Components, Modules, and Plugins. It's like being given cubes, blocks and boxes ... and always being told you're trying to fit the wrong thing into that square hole! But, by far the biggest drawback of Joomla is it's back-end administration. It makes setting up and maintaining a Joomla site far harder than it should be. If you're setting up a Joomla site for a customer, expect them to never really learn the basics of how to maintain their site, and add content. You will always be the 'expert' called on to do little simple things that should be obvious in the interface, but aren't. One PHP-based CMS that looks interesting is modx: http://modxcms.com/ But, I haven't tried it, so I can't vouch for it. Of course, WordPress is pretty ubiquitous, and is a good choice for blogging-type sites. The best single CMS resource I've found is cmswire: http://www.cmswire.com/ They maintain a comprehensive Software Directory, which is searchable. -Ken