Joomla

zena2

New member
Aug 29, 2007
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In a NY state of mind
First off, I'm not a programmer. My company uses an independent website design company to create its website but they're charging up the ass for stupid shit that should come with the site build like an xml site map. Plus, they know nothing about SEO so the navigation isn't where it should be. It was suggested by someone to get rid of them and switch to Joomla. I'm not that familiar.

Pros/Cons anyone?
 


You can always take a look at the joomla website. IMO if you plan to use an opensource CMS you may want to consider Wordpress or drupal as well. Overall I use Wordpress on just about any type of website. I'm not sure with the others but with wordpress an xml sitemap can be created by uploading the google sitemap plugin which is 100% free. Plus there are many WP designers that will create a badass unique theme for you ( for a fee ) or you can use a premium theme service.
 
Not sure if it's much better now, but a couple years ago I wanted to gouge my eyes out trying to work with Joomla as a CMS. Difficult to customize, heavyweight, and tons of useless or buggy modules.

IMO, anything else.
 
Joomla has come along way over the last few years. I tend to use Joomla for all my sites and think its beast (requires a few modifications to get it SEF though, but only takes a few minutes).
Theres gonna be a learning curve with any CMS you go for.
 
I use Drupal and like it. Drupal has a lot of great plugins to add depth to your website in terms of making it more of a community type site. Drupal also has SEO plugins as well. It's a bit heavier than WP and WP is probably easier to configure out of the box for SEO.

BTW: It's a bad idea to hire web designers who know nothing about SEO. My 2 cents.
 
Not being exactly sure of your demands. But another CMS that may be of interest is Wordpress MU. If your company likes to create seasonal or promotional websites then wpmu may be the solution for you. You can create many subdomain websites without dropping or changing your main website. When your promo is over simply deactivate the subdomain. WPMU will require some modification to have it work you way you want it to.
 
If your company's site is full of information, but no dynamic data loading, then I would suggest WordPress only. Its fast to install, easily be configured. There are loads of free templates and you might want to look into magazine style layout for WP. They look awesome.

And WP can easily handle 500 pages.
 
Yeah, 500 pages is really nothing by today's standards when using something like Wordpress; if you go with Drupal, you are probably going to need someone around with some programming experience, or you will need to plan on putting in some extra hours.
 
I am building my first site and I am using Drupal. At first I did have a really hard time using it - I had tough time getting and creating the template I wanted. I almost gave up on drupal but then somehow I edited the template the way I wanted in one day and everything else fell into place.

Now I like drupal and I am glad I did not give up on it. However there are many little details which are very important and that have to be configured so I am still learning about them and finding new ones every day.

Also I started my development on Xampp. If I would develop the site online first it would be much more difficult to learn drupal and most likely I would give up if I had to do all that learning and work online. Others VM's did not work well for me.
It's a good idea to get older version of Xampp and not the newest one as i.e. the newest php is not supported in Drupal 6.x etc. as I found out using the newest Xampp at first.

It would be probably easier creating my first site in Wordpress but I think I am learning much more using Drupal.

Now I have to set up my site on a host in a few days i.e. starting tomorrow.

That is the reason you do not see me spamming this forum as much as I am trying to put out my first site. In the last six weeks I learned some of this software to begin to create my site in Drupal:
-photoshop
-fireworks
-artisteer - I bought this - but be warned - I was able to use it only as a prototyping tool for drupal. It is supposed to work better for Wordpress
-MySQL-is integral to Drupal - learned from Lynda
-Axure
-html - some
-Css- some
-Firebug - really important for editing templates in drupal
-Visio - for prototyping my site
-Excel - keyword research
-of course Xampp
-notepad for code editing

I am not a programmer but I understand and can read code, which is sometimes really important to customize Drupal i.e. the theme. I read one book on html and one on CSS which helped. I should probably read one more on php if I can find the time. But so far I did not need much php with drupal as I did not customize that heavily.

After all this with drupal I think that I could put out WP site in 2-3 days from what I saw on their site. Simple blog in one day? I never used WP but I seemed to be more confident after playing with drupal - there seems to be a lot of similarities.

So that is my experience with Drupal as a noob who said 2 months ago that he will build a website.

By the way it took me all of 5 min to install XMLmodule and generate XML sitemap.

:banana_sml::banana_sml::banana_sml::banana_sml::banana_sml::banana_sml::banana_sml::banana_sml::banana_sml:
 
if you go with Drupal, you are probably going to need someone around with some programming experience, or you will need to plan on putting in some extra hours.

QFMFT. You still need someone that knows what they're doing in control of the thing.

At work I've put our corporate sites on Drupal 5 and Drupal 6. I thought that giving admin rights to the web designer of 9 years and the newly graduated web designer wouldn't be so bad but I was wrong. They basically have no fucking clue how a site should be structured or how things work. So yeah, when you hear about Drupal's steep learning curve it's quite true.

Another downside is that you'll be upgrading modules constantly. Drupal itself will require 1-3 upgrades a year to keep its security up to date. The modules you install - you'll probably end up needing to upgrade them [at least one of them] once a week if not more often. Most of the time this is flawless but when you get into modules that touch just about everything such as i18n then it can become a pain when upgrading breaks some other part of your site.

So yeah, just don't think that Joe in accounting is going to be able to put your site on Drupal and everything will run smoothly. You need someone who really understands content, and pages, and taxonomy, and how pages on a web site can and should intersect with each other. You can probably hire someone in-house to do everything for the same amount of money you were sending to that overpriced design agency - and you'll get about 5x more output.