Is Joomla worth my time.

I have been working on lots of site modafaction. Some of which has not been going too good. Someone on here suggested Joomla. I have installed it and think I like what I am seeing, however I have a lot to learn. I was just wondering what people think of it.

The basics of my website is household pet information such as forums, care sheets, stories. Also I need to set up something where people can rate and comment on funny animal pictures. So like I said...what do you think of Joomla?

Adam Burgi

 

Joomla (for me) is a god sent wrapped up in an Open Source package.
Seriously, I do not build sites from scratch anymore. Everything i build is Joomla, and half of them don't look like a Joomla site! Components are a cinch as they have a similar structure to a standalone PHP file, and then there are the Open Source components, modules, mambots, templates!

Easy choice and recommendation for me champ, Joomla is well and truly worth it.

 

thenetninja Can you share some links to site you have made with this, either here or in a PM? Thank you.

Adam Burgi

 

IMO I find Joomla a bit more complex and feature-bloated compared to Drupal.

 

mm, fair call each to their own i say =)

 

it honestly depends on what you want to do - personally drupal feels more user freindly

 

Most people who are experienced with Joomla seems to love it. They say it is great, once you learn all the ins and outs.

I have one site that I am using Joomla on, mostly so I can learn it. I am starting to see the benefits, but for me at least it is a steep learning curve. Most of my sites are on wordpress.

 

dont work with joomla... wordpress all the way

 

Loves it. Can't rave about it enough.

It looks somewhat intimidating, he says, but once you fiddle around with it and see just what it can do, you'll never look back.

His site is http://aventhusiast.com

He wanted a blog to not look like a blog.

Functionality out of the box is somewhat less than Wordpress, and Wordpress has the hard-to-beat benefit of having such a large developing fanbase to work with, but Joomla has it's own core group of coders that have developed some nice plugins.

 

Joomla is good depending on ur requirements, if you can get used to it, will be good, but there is a nice learning curve involved with it, with wordpress it does not take much.

 

Wordpress baby.

 

I like Joomla and using it on a couple of sites. Drupal seems to be more flexible, but requires more time to start and understand how to do things.
Wordpress is very easy to use, but basically it's blog, so you are limited in functionality.
However, there are limitations for any kind of content management software.
I pointed to some Joomla limitations here
It is easier to use template engine (from Dreamweaver, for example) for some applications. As an example, I was not able to figure out how to make Adventure Literature site with Joomla. It would require two many different modules on different parts of the site and would be hard to control module to content dependence. It looks that this problem could be overcomed with Drupal, but I'not so familiar with it.

 

well from experience, Joomla works great for me. In fact I have stopped developed from scratch applications since I have learnt the core to point that I have.

 

Well I am still looking around and playing with joomla. I looked at wordpress for a moment but like begemot said, it seems to be mainly for blogs and my site is way more then just a blog. But I thank everyone for their replies.

Adam Burgi

 

joomla is great

 

In the end WordPress is the easiest to work with when it comes to the administrator interface and the integration of the design

Usually I'll try to see if the website I'll be developing on is feasible in WordPress before looking at Drupal or Joomla.

 

I came across this post and I wanted to give my opinion on it.
I specialize in Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress (as well as a bunch of other scripts) an Joomla is hands down the one I end up using most often for websites. WP is a great option for user blogs but it's limited as a CMS. Drupal is an excellent CMS and in many areas I prefer it to Joomla, but inld applications it falls short to Joomla by a great margin. These are just some of the reasons why I end up working with Joomla more often than the others:

1) It's easy to understand for the client
2) It has a great installation script (Drupal I believe borrowed it)
3) It has over 1500 third party contributions you can use. Some free others commercial. They also work almost in every version and they are constantly updated. Drupal on the other hand has fewer third party contr. and some won't work on other versions. A majority of them in fact.
4) Joomla template system is far superior to Drupal's. Drupal uses 3 different template system (at my own last count) and all of them are hard to use and have spotty documentation. Even the Drupal developers know that and they are working on a solution probably coming out in V. 7 (V6.0 is in beta)
5) Joomla has a plethora of high quality, low cost, XHTML compliant commercial templates that are easy to customize. Many of my clients prefer to have me use one of those instead of having me build one from scratch. It can save $500 in the final price with equally unique and good results.
6) Joomla can be SEO optimized and Accessible. So can Drupal, in fact, out of the box D. is better, but the obscure templating system makes D. a poor choice for accessibility and low cost.

In the accessibility and SEO area, I usually use the a8e accessible Joomla built, which changes all the <table> tags to <div> and inserts <h1> in the titles.
Joomla 1.5 will have an override system that will make a8e obsolete.
In addition, I have created my own core hacks that now I install on every built by simply uploading my file system (a la Zen Cart). It has ulterior SEO and accessibility fixes.

Recently I also developed my own "De-Joomlification" hacks that practically take out every mention of Joomla from the source code and graphics. That's very useful to fight the script kiddies and very easy to do.

I often hear complaints about Joomla that are usually the fruit of ignorance or misinformation. One of them is the fact that Joomla sites all look the same. Nothing could be further from the truth, but if anyone went to see the 50 or so sites I built in the past couple of years (some were Mambo) except for the very first ones they would be hard press to recognize them as Joomla.
What these folks see is websites where the developers used the default template or some other popular Joomla template. I have designed Joomla sites (including a couple for California and another state) that were not only level 3 accessible, but looked almost identical to their static counterpart.
After using the SH404 SEF URL component and making a few changes here and there in the code the only Way to recognize one of my sites as Joomla based would b to go through it with a fine toot comb and look at the JS code in some places where one is likely to find references to Joom_filename or something like that.
I am working at eliminating those instances as well.

In conclusion, without taking anything away from Drupal and WP, Joomla is a better choice for more clients and for developers that prize rapid deployment. Wordpress is also very fast and cheap to deploy, but it's a blog. Drupal needs some fine tuning and it needs to develop more of a following from commercial providers and users alike.

All of them are a better choice than building static web pages, something I have not done in the past 2 years. Even static "brochure" sites are made with Joomla or WP and I simply do not tell the client until, invariably, they come back to me wanting more features and the ability to edit their own pages. At that point I showed them the admin site and send them on their way with a smile on their faces.

 

yup thats right, Joomla ftw =)
No seriously there are some awesome mods for Joomla and not all Joomla sites look like Joomla either!

 

How long does it take to learn a basic understanding of Joomla?

 

It is very simple to start making basic things. If you do have some experience with CMS, you'll realise that administrative interface is probably the best among them. Also, Joomla comes with nice amount of sample data and you can get sense of things by browsing front end and looking how corresponding things are configured in admin area.