I have been a joomla user for over a year now (First sig link on the left). When I was first looking into CMS's as a Dynamic solution I ended up testing Drupal, CMSMS, WordPress, & Joomla. After I heard that the United states Department of Justice switched to a joomla backbone I started focusing more attention on it & played with a few template integrations. Within 30 days I had the baseline integration down pat & started designing my own templates & themes for joomla. You will notice the my first sig is a totally unique Joomla design. As far as SEF Urls goes, I have tried 4 or 5 of the SEF modules developed for Joomla & they all ended up causing other errors or set backs. I ended up trashing all my SEF Url attempts & going with the next best thing - The 2 click page rule - The 2 click page rule is simply setting up your site so that every page is accessible within 2 clicks from the home page. That way no matter how dynamic the URL is it will still be indexed for its content. You'll notice I added a text based navigation footer that links to categories in order to stay within the 2 click rule. My site is currently 3,100+ pages & growing - 65%+ pages ARE indexed in google (Even with the long dynamic urls). Joomla may take a few months to get used to & 1-2 years to master, But I must admit, it is the most robust CMS i have come across. Not to mention it's world renowned & has the MOST Free templates & Modules Than any other OpenSource CMS. I'm sure you will be VERY satisfied with it once you start to learn the basics. Good luck & feel free to check my first sig link for an example.
what do you mean you totally customized Joomla template, i can still see in 5 second it is the default joomla template, the ugly one - you just dropped a banner and changed colors a bit everybody is using this template if they are newbies
Joomla is the best to use once you know it, drupal is horrible, to do anything specific you will have to code your own plugins or edit the core. An example of this. Create a DHTML menu or image menu in joomla extremely easy. Download a component and away you go, or edit the menu in admin. Create the same in drupal, it will never happen unless you know how to code php and dhtml. Joomla is the best trust me. An example of a joomla site i created. www.joomlatemplatestyle.com there are some free templates there to get you on your way to a great website!
That's a joke, right? Sorry, but with phpBB's track record even if they threw it all out and started over I STILL wouldn't trust them. Security holes big enough to sail the USS IOWA through, responsable for taking down well over half the internet just two to three years ago, a raging hardon for hard-coding presentation (usually baby sized fonts that are useless on most 'modern' displays), and a need to mod it out the yazoo for the simplest of functionality... You know there's something wrong when they can advertise attachments, topic copy/merge, etc, etc, as new 'features'. Besides, people here are talking CMS - and modding phpBB to act as one is just asking for headaches and to most likely nueter your upgrade path - the type of thing that LED to the NeverNoSanity hell in the first place! How many phpBB2 users cannot run a normal upgrade in the first place because they rewrote most of the code to make it remotely useful? 80%? More?
Joomla! is quite good. I run a 1.0.x site with a couple of standard extensions and some custom ones too plus a lot of hacking to make the CMS work (mostly) the way I wanted it to. I did try WordPress, Drupal and Typo 3 but felt the support behind Joomla is quite strong, commercial devs are the way to go if you need serious work done in a hurry. SEO is not great out of the box so I used the OpenSEF extension which effectively does the mod_rewrites and has a user interface to manage all the URLs. Only problem is it got dropped by its devs and is now run by a new dev under the new project name NuSEF. J1.5 is supposed to be a bit more promising in the SEO department although I've not had first hand experience of testing it as yet. The learning curve has been quite steep for a site in the commercial arena, especially in so far as optimising the server set-up etc. If you're going for high traffic, lots of content and SEO capabilities then make sure you have a dedicated server and an ISP who knows how to configure and tweak their server to be optimised with Joomla! The least anybody can do is give it a go and see if it works for them... As much as I like Joomla! I've heard good things about Drupal, Typo3 and other systems and would love to have the time to find the perfect CMS if there is such a thing.
and it shows - 51 validation errors, fixed sized fonts useless to 'large font/120dpi' users, meaningless classnames, improper header order, tables nesting single elements...
Could you show me one comparable? & it's Not a default, you might not be looking in the right place (I mean, you are aware that no matter what design you use you HAVE to set it as default, otherwise it won't show right?). 2ndly, I'm not sure your instruction would be that beneficial seeing that you haven't figured out how to change a simple browser Favicon yet. you still have a Joomla Favicon, Did you just install it yesterday & haven't had time to fix it yet? In addition, if you want to criticize, compare mine & yours, Now which one is, umm, Basic? I think your advise stems from self righteousness & a high ego. I never attacked your poorly designed site (Until now of course). At any rate, it was provided as an example to the thread starter, I'm sure he can see the difference between both our advices & the sites we each provided for examples. I do wish you the best though.
I've been meaning to look at it myself actually - It there much of a learning curve involved? I'm the kind of guy who goes, "oh I must look into this and I must look into that" but then after a few minutes in I realise, "man I don't have time to learn all that". I mean I'm happy to learn something it it'll either A, save me time in the long run or B, if it's likely to be something a customer is going to ask me about. But if I went around learning every bloody thing I'd never get anything done. Is it really worth my while looking into it? And Is the code really that messy?
Here is an example of a site powered by joomla: www. csaps .ca It is a great content management system, but I personally prefer wordpress for a lot of things.
There is always a learning curve and it's as steep as how you want to push your eventual site. I'd simply say "give it a go" and be patient with it. Official Porsche Brazil site is a good example
i have a bunch of sites and have just started using joomla. My take is that its great as long as its fits your needs. I wouldnt be so enthusistic about trying to use it if a lot of customs stuff was needed. There a lot of add ons out there already though. Given its cost I would atleast try it.