[AccessD] AccessD Digest, Vol 95, Issue 17

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



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