Hi all, Although I'm sure this is a topic that has been bounded about from pillar to post within this forum I am really interested to know what the more popular choice is for an individual when starting to develop a website. I used to be a create it from scratch kind of girl but after discovering WordPress I feel that my coding expertise has been left adrift somewhat. Although I spend time wading through my chosen themes to tweak them into behaving I haven't really created a site from nothing in a long time. Is this becoming common? Have any of you moved from hard-coded sites into the easy to use content management systems on the market today? If so, which ones? If possible I'd really love to hear some for and against arguments for these systems. Are they removing the desire to code, aside from those individuals that are actually making the themes? Is that necessarily a bad thing? How important is it for users of a CMS to have a fundamental knowledge in the things that make it tick (HTML, PHP, CSS, etc)? Thanks in advance for your comments, I'll be watching with interest. <discuss>
It must be late... Could have sworn I set the title to 'How DO you build yours...'! Such is life as they say.
I recently built an eCommerce site. My core was an open platform (Magento), but I had to customize it a lot. I guess this is also true for open CMS platform like Joomla. I didn't write code for probably 14 years. But It took me few hours to restart coding, although I had to learn new languages and concepts: PHP, JS and CSS. I also had to play with mySQL. I must say it was a lot of fun. Cheers, Sty
wordpress is very easy for the webmaster to add/edit content end user and relatively easy to modify/create themes, for instance i built the theme at coloura.com from a blank developers template. but it does have its limits, for ease of customisation if you can code, nothing beats a html/css page in my opinion
Is GIMP a hard piece of software to use? I remember having a look at it once and it seemed less obvious how to do simple things than the more expensive equivalents like Photoshop. I'd be curious to know what everyone does do for their graphics - outsource or create? If you were creating a website for someone else that wanted an easy maintenance option would that make WordPress the better choice then? I remember trying to code a CMS once... It took weeks of effort and was nothing like as powerful. But having said that it does frustrate me that I can't always make things look exactly how I want them to with WP - it's a tricky balancing act.
I find GIMP easy to learn and use. I came to it with no experience in such tools, and learned it on the fly.
BTW, I am not a CMS expert, but my friends are telling me that Joomla is more flexible than WordPress. You can start with minimum customization and add your modules over time. On the other hand, it is probably easier to start with WordPress.
I think joomla is more flexible compared to others. Initially it may take some time but I can tell you your effors will be worth.
Joomla and Wordpress are each good for their own specific niches. I personally like to use the Joomla as the CMS and integerate a Wordpress blog within the site so you get the best of both worlds.
In simplistic terms then... Does this mean that WordPress sites are best limited to those that are blogging only and that Joomla would be better for creating different sites? What's the learning curve like on Joomla? I didn't find WordPress too hard to master but I've heard that Joomla is a bit more complex. Obviously WordPress also has the strength that there's so many themes and plugins and the like - does Joomla offer anything similar? Apologies for all the questions, just trying to get my head around the best methods to use for all of my future internet-endeavours. Many thanks, Bex