Joomla's Project Director Talks 1.1
daria42 writes "It's been a hectic six months for the Joomla open-source CMS since its split from the Mambo project, but according to this interview with project director Andrew Eddie there are even faster times ahead. Next week Joomla will make its formal debut at LinuxWorld Expo in Boston, with the milestone Joomla 1.1 release due towards the end of April. As Mambo and Joomla continue to diverge, Eddie says, users and developers will be forced to declare their colours and pick one or the other for production sites."
When Smilnar director James Smith presented at the annual HARVL conference, he introduced that the Smilnar project would be joining the Yarbel group to create a new product code-named "Woolpun". Critics of the merger cite problems with Smilnar's compatibility problems with other Romolad systems, but Smith had some choice words for them: "Stewfoo"
All well and good, but the real step needed for OSS CMS is to create one that an average user can administer. By "average" I mean anyone who isn't a hard core code geek. The kind of person who is comfortable installing these systems to their server, but who is more interested in tweaking the look and adding content than spending hours figuring out the arcane thinking of the people who wrote the code.
I've tried Joomla, as well as few other top rated CMS, and found all of them pretty much imcomprehensible. I'm sure that there is some underlying logic to the Administration of each of these systems, but I have failed to find it. Terminology, functionality, it all cries out for testing by real users.
Blog software like Wordpress has managed to make Administration nice, understandable, and constantly improving, so why can't CMS like Joomla do the same?
And of course, they really do need some real documentation, not half baked wikis and forums.
Three Squirrels