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Joomla!?

bug_girl

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I have been experimenting with CMS systems for a while, and I've just fallen in love with Joomla. Pretty darn easy!

We are still having trouble with our current system (50+ editors, using Contribute. Ugh.), and I am so ready for a switch.

However, I'm still not sure. We do have a working system, it just needs a sidebar re-design and a lot of content re-arrangement. But Joomla would let us have online forms and more flexible menu management.

Anyone here have experience with Joomla?
Made a switch to a web-based CMS?

I figured if I asked for opinions here, I would get some :D
 
A co-worker of mine recently had a two-days course in Joomla and he's really happy with it. That's about all I can say about it. Haven't tried it myself. I'm looking for a CMS right now, too.
 
bug_girl said:
Anyone here have experience with Joomla?
Made a switch to a web-based CMS?
Click to expand...
I've tried working with Joomla. Saying their documentation is lacking would be an understatment. But on the other hand what is good for James Randi can't be that bad for me. Yes the JREF uses Joomla.
 
I've experimented with several CMSs and built sites with some of them. For basic sites, I prefer Wordpress with various plugins.

For more complex sites, IMHO it's between Joomla and Drupal. Both have their pros and cons. From a web developer's perspective, Drupal is far more flexible, and is the better choice if you want to run multiple sites under one CMS. A lot of larger, sophisticated sites use Drupal as their CMS because of its flexibility.

But from the end user's perspective, Joomla is easier to master, partly because the Drupal developers insist on using geekspeak such as referring to content types as "nodes." Joomla has a sleeker and more user-friendly design.

Joomla will work well for probably 90% of the sites out there.

Neither Joomla nor Drupal is likely to work 100% for you "out of the box." You will need to install various extensions, tweak templates, and possibly dig into the PHP coding here and there. Just so you know. :-)
 
Joomla has been very easy to use for my purposes. It's very community driven with EXTREMELY helpful forums. The community itself creates plugins for it that provide even more functionality.

The site I ran consisted primarily of a phpBB 3.0 forum system, integrating the users into a Joomla system was painless with the use of a simple plugin provided by some of the Joomla community authors.

I've used a handful of CMS in the past, and Joomla takes the cake.
 
bug_girl said:
...snip...

Anyone here have experience with Joomla?
Made a switch to a web-based CMS?

I figured if I asked for opinions here, I would get some :D
Click to expand...

Drop a note to Rich and Jeff, they moved the old JREF site to being a Joomla powered site.
 
Anybody want to briefly compare Joomla with Expression Engine? I've been dabbling with the free version and really like it - the documentation is very thorough and there seem to be a good selection of modules. But I haven't tried Joomla or Drupal due to lack of time. Is it really worth shelling out money for a CMS or are the main free ones actually better?
 
I've used Joomla, and overall it's well designed and has a lot of community support. It has a modular design, and there are literally thousands of add-on modules that do almost everything you can think of.

The version I used (1.x) had some shortcomings in the security model. They don't really have the concept of tiered access, such as lower access users can do X on the site; level 2 users can do X and Y; level 3 users can do X, Y , and Z, and level 4 users can do everything. It almost takes an "all or nothing" approach: if you can log in to a Joomla site, you can do pretty much everything the site has been set up to do. (For people familiar with Joomla, I'm referring to the public side of the site, not the administrative back-end.)

There's also a bit of a learning curve. Be prepared to build an initial site, then once you've learned all the glitches, throw it away and implement the site properly.
 
I'm not that experienced with CMSs, but have implemented one Joomla site. It's pretty flexible. We were able to turn off most of the features and the look that make it portal-like and rethink the ones we wanted, all pretty much with the work of one graphic designer slash (limited) php hacker. It's all in the template, with a bit of documentation-digging and asking around you can do almost anything there. You can redefine the code that displays content directly in the template if you need to.

If you want more functionality, modules seem a pretty solid system. Some of the good ones are commercial, but cheap, and some things just don't seem to exist. You could always create them yourself.

We had one hacking / defacing incident, but that was beacause of missed security updates on our part, so keep your install current.

The biggest limitation as I see it is that you can't nest categories. You get two levels - articles belong in "categories" which belong in "sections". If you want more levels, or less, as in our case, tough luck. They're hardwired. In our case, we have an "Everything" section with the categories we need, and have modified the template to not show the "everything".
 
Shrinker said:
Anybody want to briefly compare Joomla with Expression Engine? I've been dabbling with the free version and really like it - the documentation is very thorough and there seem to be a good selection of modules. But I haven't tried Joomla or Drupal due to lack of time. Is it really worth shelling out money for a CMS or are the main free ones actually better?
Click to expand...

Im using Joomla with my own personal site, and using Expression Engine for a site that Im taking over.

EE is actually very nice to use, and you can simply just make pages and such. However, I didn't like the way they set up urls , (ie domain.com/index.php?template/ etc . you have to do a little "hack" to get it so that you can have normal url's ( ie domain.com/page/ )


I like both. each has its strenght and weaknesses. I favor Joomla since its Open source and there is a good support forum and users out there to make it useful. EE, it took me a week to finally get an answer on how to fix ssomething.
 
Blue Mountain said:
There's also a bit of a learning curve. Be prepared to build an initial site, then once you've learned all the glitches, throw it away and implement the site properly.
Click to expand...

Ha! Yep, I will probably have to start over with a basic install, now that I've broken several things :)

I thought about Drupal, but it just isn't as easy for me to manage.
There are some plugins for user management in Joomla, which I'm hoping will let us have at least a couple of additional levels of management.
(if you aren't an author of the page, you can't edit it, etc.)
 
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