NYCPHP Meetup

[Hans C. Kaspersetz]

Halter, Shari wrote:
>
> Any suggestions?  
>
> I am not familiar with Joomla, but I wonder how it would compare at the
> front end?
>   

My group has been customizing and installing Joomla for a couple of 
years.  It offers inline editing using a wysiwig.  It has it quirks but 
works very well for our customers.  We usually write a small manual that 
summarizes the full Joomla manual and covers just the features the 
customer will be using.  And we customize the administrative interface 
to remove access to the nasty bits the users may not need.  Joomla does 
create some ugly URLS and the templating is nav driven, so these can be 
headaches also.  You can access the same piece of content through more 
then 1 URL even if that URL is not defined in the navigation.  This can 
be a problem for some and needs to be considered.  If you install 
Joomla, take some time to download and read the manual.  It is very 
helpful.  Ahh!!!  One more thing.  1 piece of content can only be 
categorized into one Section/Category.  This can be a problem if a piece 
of content should truly be in categorized in two places at once.   This 
can be handled creatively.

I would strongly recommend avoiding contribute.   It is like an evil 
pink Cool-Aide.  It scales very very poorly.   The template control 
system is awful.  If you want to make a change to a main navigational 
element through Contribute, it will download every page and make the 
change.  The process of downloading, updating and uploading hundreds or 
thousands of pages takes a long time and is failure prone.  Nothing in 
contribute is database driven, it is purely file driven.  It is nice for 
the first 10-25 pages of a site.  Beyond that and thing get very 
difficult to manage.

Just my $.02.

Hans K