Joomla

Yesterday it was Drupal, today it is Joomla.

Firstly I will say that I gave Joomla more time than I did Drupal but I think that was down to the interface and the fact I made some progress relatively quickly.

What I attempted to do was put a site up using a site I had designed and developed in XHTML and CSS. It took 4 or 5 hours to get the homepage up and running and I had to edit a random article that just kept appearing. It looks well but it is not ideal. Creating a template was not too difficult once I found a decent tutorial, but it all felt a little too complicated.

Let's compare results:

CMSMadeSimple: Setup took about an hour because I had to download, upload and install. Creating the site, template and css and all the pages took 30 minutes. It is simple. The downside is the interface isn't very jazzy, but it is easy to use.

Drupal: Setup was quick and easy because it is a built in application on my new blacknight hosting account. That's where the progress ended. Templates or themes are incomprehensible and just downright bizarre. I couldn't get a page up and running let alone the site.

Joomla: Set up was quick again because it is a built in application on my blacknight hosting. Creating a template was not straight forward but there was a decent tutorial. Shame I can't find a good list of the PHP functions associated with Joomla. I had the problem of a random article appearing and i couldn't figure out why. In the end I just edited it to be the content I wanted. It has a nice interface except that the menus are disabled once you are in any of the options so you spend a lot of time clicking close or cancel to get the menu back. I want to like it but it is just not user friendly enough and as with most open source software, there is a lot of documentation but not a lot of useful documentation.

I think I'm going to go with CMSMadeSimple for now and maybe personalise it a bit to suit my needs a bit better. If you have any other suggestions I would be glad to investigate further.