Joomla Simmering

Posted on July 25, 2007
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I noticed yesterday that Joomla! had made 1.5 RC1 available, so I downloaded and installed it over here.

So, was I impressed and did it seem worth all the hype and ballyhoo? Well, up to a point, Lord Copper.

People always say things like, “When I looked under the hood/bonnet, I was amazed!” but I have not looked at the code and do not pretend that I can tell good code from bad.

It seemed slow. The last time I looked at the plugins etc over at Joomla, there seemed to be more than anyone could reasonably wish for, but that is now also the case for WordPress, Drupal, Xoops and the rest. I was surprised that with such a long time arriving, a great deal of extensions are not ready, although there is a system legacy feature which allows you to install these “not yet ready” versions.

It came with two basic and moderately awful themes, which are, admittedly, easy to change within the control panel. I tried to download some others to test, but at almost all sites where themes are available for the taking, you have to register first. I tried this at three sites and found that at each of them, you still could not perform the download even after registration. Not a good sign. This also raises the perception that a lot about Joomla! actually seems quite commercial, not necessarily in operation, but certainly in style.

I am waiting for what seems like a useful plugin (Joomla! gives what I generically call plugins several different names, which is confusing) to be updated and will then have another look.

Like all CMS out there, you probably either like it or loathe it. I feel very indifferent.


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Joomla Jambalaya

Posted on July 11, 2007
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I am still vaguely wondering which Content Management System (CMS) I would like to use, so I tend to keep installing the main Open Source offerings and playing with them for a bit and then uninstalling them, all the time thinking that if you could pick and merge features from about half a dozen of them, you could have what you really wanted, rather than the 65% you normally get with just one.

The obvious place to go for anyone wanting to have a free test drive is OpenSourceCMS.com which has the main players which run on the LAMP framework.

My quibble here is that Joomla! has been languishing around in 1.5beta for what feels like most of my life. I’m sure this is not the case, but it seems like a very long time ago that it won the Packt Publishing Award on a promise that it was going to be really good.

I have tried to install it, but whereas most other CMS jump out of the box and stick themselves like glue to your server (with almost no intervention from you) while you are distracted by your coffee or the television or your wife telling you off, Joomla! just seems to lurk around, hesitant and petulant, until you both decide to call it a day and give up and press delete.

As I seem to remember, although I may be wrong, the person behind OpenSourceCMS.com said: for most people, if they actually go through their real requirements, their need is not for a CMS in the first place, but a blog.


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