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Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5
Michael J. Ross writes "Web developers are oftentimes under pressure to build attractive sites as quickly as possible, and thus they are increasingly making use of content management systems (CMSs), which offer most of the functionality typically needed in a site, such as user authentication, site-wide styling, and of course managing content contributed by site owners and users. Joomla is an extremely popular and heavily-used CMS, partly because it is one of the easiest to install, configure, and use as a starting point for a new site. But with all CMSs, Joomla's online documentation and forums can prove frustrating to the new developer. Books such as the recently published Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5 are intended to fill that gap." Keep reading for the rest of Michael's review.
Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5
author
Hagen Graf
pages
384
publisher
Packt Publishing
rating
7/10
reviewer
Michael J. Ross
ISBN
184719530X
summary
An introductory-level guide to the latest version of Joomla.
Written by Hagen Graf, with a guest chapter by Angie Radtke, Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5 was published on 28 March 2008 by Packt Publishing, under the ISBNs 184719530X and 978-1847195302. It is an update of his earlier book, Building Websites with Joomla! v1.0, put out by the same publisher. Like the previous edition, this latest one is aimed at beginning and intermediate Web developers who wish to learn how to make the most of Joomla for building new sites or maintaining existing ones that they have inherited.
The author has organized the book's material into 17 chapters and seven appendices, covering the major topics of interest to Joomla developers: terms, concepts, and sample sites; Joomla installation; a site's major elements; customization of language, and by templates; the administrative interface; the primary menus (Site, Menus, Content, Components, and Extensions); some commonly used tools; some popular extensions; writing templates; accessibility; MVC, components, modules, and plug-ins; building a sample site; and analysis of some bonus templates. The book's 384 pages conclude with a rather sparse index.
On the publisher's Web page, visitors can read more about the book, download the sample code, post feedback or a question, read the online table of contents, and download a sample chapter, namely, the second one in the book, on Joomla installation. The publishers also make it possible to purchase an electronic version of the book, which could be especially handy for any reader who would like to reference the book while working off-site, and without lugging the print version along with their laptop.
The publisher's site characterizes it as a "fast paced tutorial," but the book gets off to a slow start, on a micro level and on a macro level. The first eight paragraphs are devoted to explaining the concept of a content management system, and its variations, which is essentially a waste of space for the typical reader of such a book. Any developer interested in reading a Joomla book certainly does not need such a lengthy explication. If the purpose is to enlighten people unfamiliar with how Web applications work, then more care should be devoted to clarifying phrases that would confuse such neophytes, such as "the net." In fact, most of the introductory material could be excised or summarized. In addition, Mac users will not be pleased with the PC centricity, unremedied until Chapter 2. The first chapter later bogs down in a wearisome comparison of a Web site with a piece of real estate. Throughout the chapter, the level of discussion alternates between quite simplistic — presumably for the complete neophyte — to intermediate. It is as if the author realizes that there is a tremendous amount of material to cover, and thus needs to move along at a decent pace — one that can be comprehensible to intermediate programmers — and yet occasionally interjects overly simple material, in the hopes of not leaving behind the newbies. Overall, it doesn't work, and the chapter in particular, and the book in general, should instead target Web developers who have some experience with CMSs, or at least basic Web site creation.
The second chapter explains what underlying technologies are needed in conjunction with Joomla, and how to install them for testing. Readers should note that page 31 may give the impression that XAMPP is the only available package that includes Apache, MySQL, and PHP — but it is not. The third chapter provides a nice overview of the various major components on the homepage of a brand new Joomla site. One minor flaw is in the image on page 52, in which the "Resources" menu should be placed above the "Key Concepts" menu, as seen on page 54 and as seen by the reader if they are following along using their own Joomla installation (a practice highly recommended by both the book's author and this author).
Chapter 4 demonstrates how to install a different language for the public site and the administrator site — in this case, German. Readers whose primary or only language is English may be confused as to why the author begins the detailed Joomla coverage with this more specialized topic, rather than starting with the material found at the beginning of the next chapter. It is possible that the author concluded that the rest of the reading audience would want to first install the language module for their primary language, which makes sense. On page 68, the author refers to the template named Kepri as "previously introduced," but I can't find where this was done, and the index is of no help (it does not even have a section for the letter K). Far more confusing, and irritating, is when authors make reference to some file that the reader cannot find. For example, Hagen Graf instructs the reader to "download the language files from the German translation team's website." Sure, but where? Four pages later, we are told to upload tmpl_bertrand.zip, but not where to find the file. It turns out that it is in 5302_Code/chapter 16/, in the downloadable sample code from the publisher's site.
The fifth chapter is almost as short as the fourth one, and briefly describes the configuration of the Joomla administration site. The author recommends that readers still using Internet Explorer switch over to Mozilla Firefox (amen), yet oddly describes Firefox as two different browsers. There are some other minor flaws: The list of 17 toolbar elements, on page 72, would be more efficient if it were alphabetized. The second illustration on page 73 supposedly shows the results of filtering for enabled modules only, and yet the drop-down menu does not reflect that. The version numbers stated in the text on page 77, do not match those shown in the illustration on that page. Yet none of these blemishes lessen the value of the material.
Chapter 6 covers the Site menu, whose components can be accessed directly from the menu items or from icons on the Control Panel page. The author asserts that the icons allow faster access, but actually the menu items are more direct. The chapter is informative, and would be more so if the author explained what is really happening with — and how to utilize — debug messages ("Debug Language").
Chapters 7 through 10 go into the details of the Menus, Content, Components, and Extensions menus. Most of the explanations are straightforward, except that on page 143, whose third paragraph is downright baffling; also, the "Default Section Layout" and "Archive Blog" display formats mentioned are not available or even shown in the illustration on the previous page. On the first page of the seventh chapter, the author begins to introduce "an example from joomlart.com," but apparently forgot to include the example itself. Also, in the discussion of "Parameters — Component," the last two options — Target and Icon — were neglected.
Chapter 11 briefly describes three of the built-in tools, and Chapter 12 shows the reader how to install some popular extensions for customizable message boards, document management, and image galleries. The coverage of the extensions is enough to get the reader started, but the author really should explain why the reader would need to reboot their computer after installing Fireboard (page 203), or even restart the Apache server, if that is what the author meant.
With Chapters 13 through 15, Hagen Graf shifts to Joomla topics that would be of most interest to veteran Web programmers: how to develop your own templates, components, modules, and plug-ins. Sadly, at this critical juncture, the narrative and sample code become noticeably more muddled and confusing than what is found in the earlier chapters (which mostly consist of explaining the individual controls within Joomla's administrative area, and are thus easier to get right). For instance, to readers unfamiliar with div tags (likely a minority), the author recommends "selfhtml," without explaining what or where it is; presumably it is the German site SELFHTML, which is of no value to the English language readers of this book. Further on, the template provided in the downloadable code styles one's Joomla site as if no template were even in use, and not like the preview thumbnail image. The author's reference on page 229 to "one command" is baffling, and the publisher's left-justification of all the CSS rules makes the template's CSS even less readable. By the time readers reach the section titled "Integration of the Joomla! Module," they may be quite frustrated, and asking themselves, "What Joomla module?!" — despite the author's self-congratulatory comment "this has worked so well."
Chapter 14 was written by Angie Radtke, co-creator of the increasingly popular Beez template, which offers a lot more flexibility than most if not all other Joomla templates. She discusses Web accessibility ("barrier freedom") in general, and as implemented in particular by her template. The general discussion would be of interest to anyone unfamiliar with how to make Web sites more accessible, and is more thorough than what is found in some other Web design books. The template discussion would primarily be valuable to anyone developing a new template — especially one based upon Beez — and who is otherwise not aware of accessibility considerations. However, in any future editions, the HTML and CSS code should certainly be formatted better. For more advanced Joomla developers, Chapter 15 may be the most compelling one of all, because it describes how to create your own components, modules, and plug-ins — starting with an overview of the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern.
In the penultimate chapter, the author steps through the process of setting up a simple Web site (in this case, for a winery). Working through the example will help readers solidify the knowledge they gained in the earlier chapters. It would also be handy for someone proficient with CMSs who simply wants to try Joomla in the least amount of time — somewhat like a quick-start guide. The book states that Joomla does not have an e-commerce shop component. Presumably the author is referring to the fact that, at the time of his book's writing, VirtueMart did not yet support Joomla 1.5; the latest release apparently does. Lastly, much of the vintner story is superfluous and could be condensed or cut. The last chapter briefly discusses a number of available templates. The book concludes with seven appendices, most quite brief: online resources; jdoc details; two methods for changing a template logo; a link to the Joomla API; how to reset the admin password; how to migrate a Joomla version 1.0 site to 1.5; the PHP register_globals setting apropos of Joomla security.
Like so many technical books, this one certainly has its noticeable strengths and weaknesses. The author's high regard for Joomla, as well as his extensive experience with it, is truly evident throughout his book. Also, he does touch upon all the major areas that would be of interest to the Joomla programmer.
However, the book's writing could be cleaned up and clarified a great deal. It could certainly use a lot more well-placed commas to increase readability — especially for the many run-on sentences — and far fewer exclamation marks. On a larger scale, the chapter summaries add no value and should be cut. The book contains many compound adjectives lacking hyphens, just as there are a few complete statements incorrectly separated by commas and not semicolons. Many of the expressions are rather odd and puzzling; for instance, "graphic scripts" (page 250), "easiest solution nothing shifts" (page 258), and "barrier freedom" instead of the much more universal term "accessibility." Non-German readers may be turned off by the book's German centricity. Furthermore, readers don't need to be told, twice, that the German translations were done by the German translation team. The book contains at least 49 errata (which I have reported to the publisher). These do not include countless instances of the term "that" being used incorrectly in place of "who," by both the primary and guest authors. Given the considerable number of errors, the reader may begin to wonder whether the book was edited prior to production.
The book falters most when it veers away from Joomla administration toward marketing and business topics. For instance, eBay is characterized as a "flea market" (page 55), but it is more of an online auction. On the same page, the discussion on advertising, frozen spinach, etc., adds no value to the book, could easily puzzle readers, and is somewhat disjointed from the topic at hand — contradicting the author's assertion that the book is cohesive (same page). Overall, the book could use a fair amount of trimming.
In terms of the book's production, the quality is fine, but Packt Publishing is the only technical publisher that I know of that insists upon using a glossy ink, which makes the book's pages somewhat difficult to read depending upon the angle of one's reading light as it bounces off the page. Also, whoever set the text on the pages should have refrained from removing most of the indentation from the code.
From an editing perspective, Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5 is in need of considerable improvement — especially those passages that will prove most confusing to readers. But from a technical perspective, the book offers a lot of valuable information to new Joomla developers, and could easily become the preferred resource that they turn to when building their first Joomla Web sites.
Michael J. Ross is a Web developer, writer, and freelance editor.
You can purchase Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5 from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
The author has organized the book's material into 17 chapters and seven appendices, covering the major topics of interest to Joomla developers: terms, concepts, and sample sites; Joomla installation; a site's major elements; customization of language, and by templates; the administrative interface; the primary menus (Site, Menus, Content, Components, and Extensions); some commonly used tools; some popular extensions; writing templates; accessibility; MVC, components, modules, and plug-ins; building a sample site; and analysis of some bonus templates. The book's 384 pages conclude with a rather sparse index.
On the publisher's Web page, visitors can read more about the book, download the sample code, post feedback or a question, read the online table of contents, and download a sample chapter, namely, the second one in the book, on Joomla installation. The publishers also make it possible to purchase an electronic version of the book, which could be especially handy for any reader who would like to reference the book while working off-site, and without lugging the print version along with their laptop.
The publisher's site characterizes it as a "fast paced tutorial," but the book gets off to a slow start, on a micro level and on a macro level. The first eight paragraphs are devoted to explaining the concept of a content management system, and its variations, which is essentially a waste of space for the typical reader of such a book. Any developer interested in reading a Joomla book certainly does not need such a lengthy explication. If the purpose is to enlighten people unfamiliar with how Web applications work, then more care should be devoted to clarifying phrases that would confuse such neophytes, such as "the net." In fact, most of the introductory material could be excised or summarized. In addition, Mac users will not be pleased with the PC centricity, unremedied until Chapter 2. The first chapter later bogs down in a wearisome comparison of a Web site with a piece of real estate. Throughout the chapter, the level of discussion alternates between quite simplistic — presumably for the complete neophyte — to intermediate. It is as if the author realizes that there is a tremendous amount of material to cover, and thus needs to move along at a decent pace — one that can be comprehensible to intermediate programmers — and yet occasionally interjects overly simple material, in the hopes of not leaving behind the newbies. Overall, it doesn't work, and the chapter in particular, and the book in general, should instead target Web developers who have some experience with CMSs, or at least basic Web site creation.
The second chapter explains what underlying technologies are needed in conjunction with Joomla, and how to install them for testing. Readers should note that page 31 may give the impression that XAMPP is the only available package that includes Apache, MySQL, and PHP — but it is not. The third chapter provides a nice overview of the various major components on the homepage of a brand new Joomla site. One minor flaw is in the image on page 52, in which the "Resources" menu should be placed above the "Key Concepts" menu, as seen on page 54 and as seen by the reader if they are following along using their own Joomla installation (a practice highly recommended by both the book's author and this author).
Chapter 4 demonstrates how to install a different language for the public site and the administrator site — in this case, German. Readers whose primary or only language is English may be confused as to why the author begins the detailed Joomla coverage with this more specialized topic, rather than starting with the material found at the beginning of the next chapter. It is possible that the author concluded that the rest of the reading audience would want to first install the language module for their primary language, which makes sense. On page 68, the author refers to the template named Kepri as "previously introduced," but I can't find where this was done, and the index is of no help (it does not even have a section for the letter K). Far more confusing, and irritating, is when authors make reference to some file that the reader cannot find. For example, Hagen Graf instructs the reader to "download the language files from the German translation team's website." Sure, but where? Four pages later, we are told to upload tmpl_bertrand.zip, but not where to find the file. It turns out that it is in 5302_Code/chapter 16/, in the downloadable sample code from the publisher's site.
The fifth chapter is almost as short as the fourth one, and briefly describes the configuration of the Joomla administration site. The author recommends that readers still using Internet Explorer switch over to Mozilla Firefox (amen), yet oddly describes Firefox as two different browsers. There are some other minor flaws: The list of 17 toolbar elements, on page 72, would be more efficient if it were alphabetized. The second illustration on page 73 supposedly shows the results of filtering for enabled modules only, and yet the drop-down menu does not reflect that. The version numbers stated in the text on page 77, do not match those shown in the illustration on that page. Yet none of these blemishes lessen the value of the material.
Chapter 6 covers the Site menu, whose components can be accessed directly from the menu items or from icons on the Control Panel page. The author asserts that the icons allow faster access, but actually the menu items are more direct. The chapter is informative, and would be more so if the author explained what is really happening with — and how to utilize — debug messages ("Debug Language").
Chapters 7 through 10 go into the details of the Menus, Content, Components, and Extensions menus. Most of the explanations are straightforward, except that on page 143, whose third paragraph is downright baffling; also, the "Default Section Layout" and "Archive Blog" display formats mentioned are not available or even shown in the illustration on the previous page. On the first page of the seventh chapter, the author begins to introduce "an example from joomlart.com," but apparently forgot to include the example itself. Also, in the discussion of "Parameters — Component," the last two options — Target and Icon — were neglected.
Chapter 11 briefly describes three of the built-in tools, and Chapter 12 shows the reader how to install some popular extensions for customizable message boards, document management, and image galleries. The coverage of the extensions is enough to get the reader started, but the author really should explain why the reader would need to reboot their computer after installing Fireboard (page 203), or even restart the Apache server, if that is what the author meant.
With Chapters 13 through 15, Hagen Graf shifts to Joomla topics that would be of most interest to veteran Web programmers: how to develop your own templates, components, modules, and plug-ins. Sadly, at this critical juncture, the narrative and sample code become noticeably more muddled and confusing than what is found in the earlier chapters (which mostly consist of explaining the individual controls within Joomla's administrative area, and are thus easier to get right). For instance, to readers unfamiliar with div tags (likely a minority), the author recommends "selfhtml," without explaining what or where it is; presumably it is the German site SELFHTML, which is of no value to the English language readers of this book. Further on, the template provided in the downloadable code styles one's Joomla site as if no template were even in use, and not like the preview thumbnail image. The author's reference on page 229 to "one command" is baffling, and the publisher's left-justification of all the CSS rules makes the template's CSS even less readable. By the time readers reach the section titled "Integration of the Joomla! Module," they may be quite frustrated, and asking themselves, "What Joomla module?!" — despite the author's self-congratulatory comment "this has worked so well."
Chapter 14 was written by Angie Radtke, co-creator of the increasingly popular Beez template, which offers a lot more flexibility than most if not all other Joomla templates. She discusses Web accessibility ("barrier freedom") in general, and as implemented in particular by her template. The general discussion would be of interest to anyone unfamiliar with how to make Web sites more accessible, and is more thorough than what is found in some other Web design books. The template discussion would primarily be valuable to anyone developing a new template — especially one based upon Beez — and who is otherwise not aware of accessibility considerations. However, in any future editions, the HTML and CSS code should certainly be formatted better. For more advanced Joomla developers, Chapter 15 may be the most compelling one of all, because it describes how to create your own components, modules, and plug-ins — starting with an overview of the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern.
In the penultimate chapter, the author steps through the process of setting up a simple Web site (in this case, for a winery). Working through the example will help readers solidify the knowledge they gained in the earlier chapters. It would also be handy for someone proficient with CMSs who simply wants to try Joomla in the least amount of time — somewhat like a quick-start guide. The book states that Joomla does not have an e-commerce shop component. Presumably the author is referring to the fact that, at the time of his book's writing, VirtueMart did not yet support Joomla 1.5; the latest release apparently does. Lastly, much of the vintner story is superfluous and could be condensed or cut. The last chapter briefly discusses a number of available templates. The book concludes with seven appendices, most quite brief: online resources; jdoc details; two methods for changing a template logo; a link to the Joomla API; how to reset the admin password; how to migrate a Joomla version 1.0 site to 1.5; the PHP register_globals setting apropos of Joomla security.
Like so many technical books, this one certainly has its noticeable strengths and weaknesses. The author's high regard for Joomla, as well as his extensive experience with it, is truly evident throughout his book. Also, he does touch upon all the major areas that would be of interest to the Joomla programmer.
However, the book's writing could be cleaned up and clarified a great deal. It could certainly use a lot more well-placed commas to increase readability — especially for the many run-on sentences — and far fewer exclamation marks. On a larger scale, the chapter summaries add no value and should be cut. The book contains many compound adjectives lacking hyphens, just as there are a few complete statements incorrectly separated by commas and not semicolons. Many of the expressions are rather odd and puzzling; for instance, "graphic scripts" (page 250), "easiest solution nothing shifts" (page 258), and "barrier freedom" instead of the much more universal term "accessibility." Non-German readers may be turned off by the book's German centricity. Furthermore, readers don't need to be told, twice, that the German translations were done by the German translation team. The book contains at least 49 errata (which I have reported to the publisher). These do not include countless instances of the term "that" being used incorrectly in place of "who," by both the primary and guest authors. Given the considerable number of errors, the reader may begin to wonder whether the book was edited prior to production.
The book falters most when it veers away from Joomla administration toward marketing and business topics. For instance, eBay is characterized as a "flea market" (page 55), but it is more of an online auction. On the same page, the discussion on advertising, frozen spinach, etc., adds no value to the book, could easily puzzle readers, and is somewhat disjointed from the topic at hand — contradicting the author's assertion that the book is cohesive (same page). Overall, the book could use a fair amount of trimming.
In terms of the book's production, the quality is fine, but Packt Publishing is the only technical publisher that I know of that insists upon using a glossy ink, which makes the book's pages somewhat difficult to read depending upon the angle of one's reading light as it bounces off the page. Also, whoever set the text on the pages should have refrained from removing most of the indentation from the code.
From an editing perspective, Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5 is in need of considerable improvement — especially those passages that will prove most confusing to readers. But from a technical perspective, the book offers a lot of valuable information to new Joomla developers, and could easily become the preferred resource that they turn to when building their first Joomla Web sites.
Michael J. Ross is a Web developer, writer, and freelance editor.
You can purchase Building Websites with Joomla! 1.5 from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Joomla 1.5 was released? What's next, Duke Nukem Forever?
I build web site applications for a living, I've not seen a Joomla site. I generally create sites with Python and/or Django for small to enterprise use. I don't understand why this slashvertisement is on the front page.
I do not agree that non-geeks have a happy and easy time setting up, running, maintaining, and extending their sites with CMSs. They end up hiring coders or other geeky types to take care of it just as they would hire someone to write the site from scratch. If I am wrong, how far off the mark do experienced Joomla users think I am?
...are we scared yet?
After searching through the Joomla main page and the "What is Joomla?" page, I was still unable to find the underlying technology. Even the review doesn't mention it until the 5th paragraph, and then only as an afterthought. Why is it so hard to mention that the CMS is built on PHP? That is information that I really care about (as do many other website developers).
As a side note, this is why I like Wikipedia. Unlike the Joomla site and this review, it mentions "PHP" in the Joomla article header. Note to website developers; if your "about" page is less helpful than the Wikipedia article, simply take a snapshot of the Wikipedia article and make it your "about" page.
I'm the Managing Editor of the University Register, campus newspaper of the University of Minnesota, Morris. Last fall we installed Joomla to replace a bizarrely hacked-together mess of a website that was hand-coded by some student years ago that no one knows anymore. It's extremely simple to use (though we still haven't fixed a few small issues, such as the top module not appearing correctly on article pages; this isn't really due to lack of ability as it is lack of effort, as there are more important things for us to do). I would definitely recommend it to anyone that wants a site that's easy to use and configure. As a plus, it's also vastly improved our pagerank on Google, presumably because it's easier to crawl.
The Braying and Neighing of Barnyard Animals Follows.
We had Joomla on Solaris working neatly also. That needs to be started up again as a simple to install package for OpenSolaris and Solaris 10. http://www.blastwave.org/dclarke/blog/?q=node/77
If only so many of the really useful modules weren't pay-to-play.
Major kudos to Drupal.org's policy of only allowing GPLed modules into their download directory.
But new Joomla problems show up on security reports almost weekly.
And reading this review it looks like the book is much worse than 7 of 10.
For any who host multiple sites on one server, or are planning to run JOOMLA from a sub-domain, might be a good idea to bone-up on .htacccess and Apache <directory> before attempting to drop the 1.5 codebase into a server folder. I recently did a 1.5 install that required a few default overrides I wasn't expecting (Apache and PHP). Remember, phpinfo() is your friend...
Rush Limbaugh is a perfect real world example of an oxycontinmoron
I have the same comment. My first question was: What Joomla is build on? And I looked at the Joomla's site clicked on details without success then documentation and then the Wiki to finally came back here and see the fifth paragraph with MySQL, Apache and PHP mentioned. Is it so difficult to have a short notice with the prereqs on top of the description of a product? Seems to me this is always the first question, do I meet the requirements for installation.
Achille Talon
Hop!
With a name like Joomla I assumed it was written in Java (Java Object Oriented blah blah....) and almost stopped digging any further. Is it bad that I automatically assume that any technology whose name begins with J is written in Java?
I have used Joomla on a number of sites, but I find it can be very frustrating to use. There are lots of aspects that either aren't configurable, or are difficult to configure, and the documentation is poor.
One example is the way articles are laid out: the top article in any list is full-width, and then subsequent ones are in two columns. This is the default, and if it can be changed I've been unable to find the tool to change it. So if, for example, you just want articles to stack vertically like every other blog in the world, and stay full-width, it's either impossible or very non-obvious how to change that from the admin interface.
I will grant that 1.5 is a dramatic improvement from earlier 1.x; a number of complaints I had about plugins and extensibility have been fixed, and some of the new dynamic and AJAXy interfaces are very handy and slick.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
If I am wrong, how far off the mark do experienced Joomla users think I am?
I'm speaking as a Drupal user, but I feel my comments would pretty much apply directly to Joomla as well.
I know a lot about web programming. I've set up corporate portals from scratch in Java, and used various JSP and PHP scripting solutions to do smaller sites. I've also looked at frameworks like Grails and RoRails and so on.
But in the end, can you really set up something in those quickly that offers a user who is not you an easy way to add content quickly? That provides nice search engine URL's, common theming across the whole site, a forum, email support, user account registration, and so on and so forth? What about having someone else constantly research and issue security updates?
Yes I could build all that but using a CMS like Drupal or Joomla saves months and months of work for any kind of real functionality, and with that time saved you can work on some other code or customize the hell out of the CMS you are using, or add content (presumably why you put up the site to start with) or whatever. People have written so many CMS systems, I think you have to look at what you are trying to build and say to yourself - is what I am doing so much different that the world needs another system just like it?
CMS's are great for geeks for the same reason they are good for everyone else - they let you have more time to work on a problem that is truly unique and interesting.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Perhaps it's because Joomla is just the most popular of all Content Management Systems around?
And as you pointed out already: just use Wikipedia for a quick lookup about stuff you don't know about; you can put it into your searchbar options, make a bookmark, have it on you right-click menu or bind it however else you like.. - There's really no need for some arbitrary explanatory ad-laden link.
Joomla and Al are very good. But, does someone know a CMS with:
- worflows depending of the kind of content to put online (ie: a news is a different kind of content than an agenda entry than an in-depth article on a subject)
- where the content editor is not a kind of html editor (ie: if a kind content need 3 kind of information (eg: a date, a title and a text for a news) you are presented with 3 fields to input a date, a single text line for the title and a little editor with the strict minimum of formating possible (Bullets, Bold, Italic and not so much)),
- that support multilingualism (ie: display the English version of a content on the English version of the page and the XXXX version of the content on the XXXX version of the page and if the content doesn't exist in XXXX display the English one)
- and the most important feature: Could generate the site as a bunch of static html pages to put on a web server without any kind of server side language?
I installed Joomla this weekend and spent a good deal of time looking through the documentation I could find.
I was unable to figure out how to removed the gigantic JOOMLA! at the top of the home page so I gave up.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I've set up several Joomla websites starting back with the 1.0 release and my impression is that there is a steep learning curve for even an experienced web admin. The terminology is confusing, the layout controls are baroque, and it takes a little while to finally figure out where all the pieces are configured. That said, once I figured it out, it DOES work well, especially when you need your users to be able to post updates and add content themselves. There are a LOT of free extensions available that are easy to install and use. I've even written some custom extensions (for 1.0 and 1.5 native) using the pretty limited examples on the website as guides. Mostly, I used existing code as a model and made modifications from there. The documentation is not great, but it is definitely getting better, especially for version 1.5.*
I inherited a server running several Joomla/Mambo sites. Daily, I had about 10,000 scripted hack attempts. It was really a pain to have to sift through all that crap in the apache logs when I needed to find something. There were several different attacks made, and I had a bad feeling that one of these days I was going!@#$%HQ$IJG(WERMG@Q HACKED BY CHINESE
We use plone for a small corporate intranet, but I find it to be pretty complicated and annoying. It doesn't support recurring events in its calendar function, and one module for recurring events is dead, and 'Dateable' is not functional and perhaps dead. I have to agree with the users. Adding 52 events for a weekly meeting is pretty painful. I am looking at drupal and joomla, but they aren't necessarily any better for resource scheduling and calendars.
Doing a photo gallery with Plone was just bad. It is just easier for my folks to send me the photos. Then I generate a gallery with picasa and link to that from plone.
And with plone it seems like it is always easier to just hand edit the html rather than use plone's edit functions. It sort of defeats the purpose. Plone is great for all the modules that are out there, and the built in search is pretty nice, but it has such a steep learning curve that I have to make most of the changes rather than letting the users help themselves.
Anybody care to share their experience with Joomla, Drupal, etc?
If only their product name didn't have the exclamation mark in it, and their logo didn't look like a knot made out of condoms, they'd see much better uptake. :-)
I'm unfamiliar with Joomla update procedures, but Drupal has pretty good automated checks for updates that are easy to apply.
That is an important aspect with using any prepacked software that has to live out in the wild... that and just doing sanity checks on the logs from time to time to make sure nothing looks odd.
However, as I said even if you write your own stuff people might still find holes in it too - at least with the more popular CMS systems people are vigorously testing them.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I use a GREAT CMS called CMS Made Simple (cmsmadesimple.org) for almost all of my clients' websites. For those you find Joomla big, bulky, and hard to convey its use to your end Clients, CMSMS is for you. Its incredibly easy to template, easy to understand how to author content and has a brilliantly simple and intuitive architecture. My ONLY gripe is there are less modules than are available for other CMSs like Joomla and Drupal. In my opinion, if more people started using and developing modules for CMSMS, this CMS would really catch on.
I just wish all these systems (Joomla, Drupal, etc, etc, etc) had not abducted the term "CMS." It used to refer to a large scale system used to integrate common template in heterogeneous computing environments. Now it means a self contained front end to some Web based views and forms. Granted lately systems like CCK are moving in on true CMS ground, but it would be more honest to call them app frameworks, portals etc. But then the trend is fro someone to "invent" some great new system in a burst of energy, people glom onto it and start spreading the word basically with misinformation, using aimed at uninformed organizations that can genuinely benefit from lightweight systems without marketing through misinformation or outright lies.
With a name like Joomla I assumed it was written in Java (Java Object Oriented blah blah....) and almost stopped digging any further. Is it bad that I automatically assume that any technology whose name begins with J is written in Java?
No, what's bad is that you thought it was based on Java, and then nearly dismissed it out of hand.
agreed
Architectural Renderings
I don't know about you, but for me it has been useful. More useful than writing endless websites.
/. , I can communicate much better with local people than my coworkers. This results in my being more able to perform my job right.
I am from a Spanish speaking country in South America. I studied English for many years, but I only got the ability to use the right words in the right place after years of posting in Slashdot.
Right now I am working in the English speaking Caribbean. While it would have been possible to get the job without
Even in my own language, I find I am much more eloquent expressing myself, and this is the main site I post into.
Aside from the language thing, Slashdot helps me keep current with technology. I don't have the time or the motivation to check Freshmeat and a dozen other sites everyday just to see what is cooking.
Sorry for the off topic rant, but I just wanted to answer to that idea that always comes up about Slashdot being a waste of time.
"The book contains many compound adjectives lacking hyphens, just as there are a few complete statements incorrectly separated by commas and not semicolons."
really?
It's an awful schizophrenic jumble of programmers all trying to reach into the cookie jar at once.
It's a nest without a Queen Bee.
Anyone that tells you it's great:
1) Likes to see you suffer.
2) Wants to make themselves feel superior to you.
3) Probably hasn't used another CMS.
You need to extend its functionality? Sure thing someone has it - it will cost you money.
You want to find a template? Sure we've got tons. They all look the same if you don't mind. Plus, by the way we will charge you for it.
The short and simple is that most people don't need this overblown system. Most of the time you can find what you need in an older, time tested blogging system (I'm not going to get into that whole CMS/Blogging system difference argument here.)
All the sane people that I know that have used this (including myself) have found that Joomla! is unnecessarily complicated for the average to advanced user. There's far more intuitive options out there.
Architectural Renderings
I consider Joomla a potential Web-CMS-market killer application for various reasons:
:-) .
... maybe I should offer Hagen some help on that for the next release ... Gonna check if he's on Skype right now. :-)
- Installation is a breeze. Far superiour to any other CMS of simular featureset.
- It looks good and is usable. To many webkits look like crap once they are set up for end user mode. Top-of-the-line web designers have pimped Joomlas UI so much that it is a feast to work with. And other projects are scrambling to catch up. Which is a good thing aswell. I find it nearly unbelievable how they managed to improve the 1.5 UI over the 1.0 UI, even though the 1.0 UI allready is way beyond anything else out there.
- It's built with the ever present LAMP stack in mind, albeit beind independant of it.
- It's featureset is well thought out and there are countless extensions for it.
However there are things that the Joomla core team needs to address before they can claim leadership in the field:
- Flexible Access Controll is missing. There is a hardwired access controll with around about 5-8 roles, but a full blown CMS needs to have as many as the admin needs. Especially if non-trivial extensions are involved. This is a major issue and probably will be addressed in some future release. I hope they do it right and don't screw it up - which easyly can happen with badly implemented access control.
- People warned me not to look at the data/object model of Joomla 1.0 - so I didn't. I just had looked at that of Typo3 4.0 and barely survived the resulting shock. I presume that the Joomla 1.5 object model still has a few issues, probalby also due to 1.5 having a legacy mode for backwards extension compatability. A (still) less than optimal archtecture could be a showstopper for people who want to build larger applications on top of Joomla 1.5 and the new Joomla 1.5 Framework.
- They reinvented the wheel like so many others and rolled their own web application framework. I asked the lead developer why they did that instead of using CakePHP or Symfony or something like that and he reasured that they had solid reasons (legacy mode being one) but I'm still wondering if it hadn't been better not to do that. If however the Joomla Framework improves it's API and Documentation enough to catch up with the other large PHP Frameworks this could turn out to be a very good thing. Since the Joomla CMS lowers the barrier of entry into the Framework considerably - especially for non-developers.
Oh, and btw: Hagen Grafs Book on 1.5 was pushed out of the door even during Beta phase. The German edition even has 'Beta' in the title. I remember thumbing prints of it which where still warm from the press on the last years German Joomladay and Alex Kempkens (a core dev) walking up from behind and saying "That screenshot there isn't up to date anymore - I changed that interface two days ago." Duh. Talking about writing about a moving target
Despite the unusual publishing strategy, Hagen Grafs books - the German ones anyway - are good to get you started. I still have a copy of his old Beginners Guide to Mambo.
The German publisher actually published an updated version of the Joomla 1.5 book a few weeks ago allready.
And as for the translation and German style wording
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I've been using Drupal for a while, I had tried using Joomla (among many others) but it was actually a pain to customize and make look truly professional; I found Drupal to be the best fit to many websites I've done, and it integrates nicely with vBulletin which is a popular request. However, I've still never found a CMS that I absolutely love, I suppose all of them are lacking that little something that pushes them over the edge to getting my all around recommendation.
http://www.seaside.st/
I don't know Java. Why shouldn't I dismiss a CMS written (or presumably written) in Java?
GPL != Free of cost.
I'm sorry, it really does. I've used Drupal too and I don't care for it that muhc, but Joomla takes the cake. It's slow and bloated, and has anyone else had to maintain a multilingual site? For facks sake, using Joomfish for the alternate language content requires going to s completely different area of the site, away from the default language content and adding language versions there. It's like picking qyour kid up at school and then having to walk across town to get his homework :/
i disagree with Michael, it is very simple to use joomla backend to change templates and manage websites. Once taught, what is where, any one can use it. Sometimes people find microsoft word very hard to use(they actually take lessons to learn it), but this does not mean that it is actually difficult to use. Same goes with joomla or other CMSes. When i compare joomla with drupal etc, my feeling is that joomla is a lot of friendly to novice users while drupal is friendly to intermediate to advance users who would like to have more control over things.
Have you checked my blog today? NO... do it now http://amiworks.co.in/talk
Does anyonw knows about really big websites and/or big magazine or newspapers editors using Joomla or any other off-the-box cms solution?
As much I read, I always see examples like these:
- Oh! It was wonderfull for my College Club Newspaper
- My 80 years old client loves that
- Any webdesigner can customize it.
But when it gets boiled down to integration beetween other systems, content flowing from one site to another and stuff like that, I sometimes feel that theses guys (at least those that I've saw until now), will not make the point.
Maybe I'm wrong, I'm kinda biased from material that i've read, actually I need to get some of these guys, install them and use it to get a better idea.
Mom says it's time to come upstairs for dinner.
Out of the box for PHP-powered "CMS", I think:
- Joomla = Great for vertical solutions
- Drupal = Great for custom solutions and content
- Wordpress = Great for blogs, portfolio sites and galleries
Albeit, I think none of them are good for e-commerce.
Drupal's suited for editorial content - they have sites listed on drupal.org
Think a little mention of ModxCms is in order before you start listing Joomla as a 'potential Web-CMS-market killer application'. ModxCms is a powerful Ajax based CMS based on customization of templates and ability to easily add whatever applications you can dream up quite easily. Yes it is still in 0.96 version but Modx will definitely continue to take over a larger market share in the future. The main problem I have with Drupal, Joomal, etc is how you are forced into using or heavily hacking templates to get the intended design. With MOdx you can design whatever you want... no restrictions. It has one of the best web edtitors, active community, etc... highly recomended.
New View Media - Custom Website Design
1. Don't.
Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.
Why would you? Or are you incapable of learning new skills?
Ijust cruised through the comments at my usual +1. Although the post was a book review, I found exactly one comment about the book. I was hoping that maybe someone had seen or read the book and could comment on the obviously biased review.
Profanity - The sign of a small mind trying to express itself.
When I was trying to figure out what was wrong the first day, I alternated loading a Wordpress and then a Drupal codebase into the docroot. Both installed without a complaint.
Rush Limbaugh is a perfect real world example of an oxycontinmoron
It is my first comment on slashdot so be patient with me. :-) ... in English. I was talking with all the publishers and ask them whether it is possible to free the content. The German and the French book are now available on-line completely for free.
...). If you have time to translate something in another language, send me an email.
At first: Thank you for the review. I am proud to reach 7 of 10 points
Concerning the German things:
The book is a translation of a German book I wrote in November/December 2007.
It is translated into French, Dutch and as you have seen
http://joomla.cocoate.com/de/joomla-15
http://joomla.cocoate.com/fr/joomla-15-fr
I want to use this opportunity to ask you for two favors.
1. Please help me to convince other publishers to free the content of the Joomla! book by writing a comment here at slashdot or (may be better) at the books website
(http://joomla.cocoate.com/de/content/book-review-slashdotorg)
2. At the moment I talk to various people who wants to help me, to translate the online content into other languages (turkish, spanish,
I hope you enjoy the book (even if the German touch is strange) and again, thank you for the review.
Hagen
It's mainly a matter of time. Even if there's software that better suits my needs, I may be less productive if I have to learn a new language to use it.
But... it's Java. That's like saying you're not willing to use Unix because you're unfamiliar with C. Why do you care what language was used to generate the bytecodes that'll run on the JVM?
If I like to change that underlying code, it would be nice if I'd know how to do that safely. On a personal note, I have no idea whatsoever how Java works and how one could realize a Java-based CMS, but still *I* would take a look at such a CMS if its properties sound interesting. But I can understand if others prefer an all-PHP solution. Additionally, maybe there are drawbacks of the language itself I'm not aware of ... If my reasoning looks absolutely queer, that's maybe because I don't know Java. However, I think it is sound, from a certain perspective.
It's the tools that count. For me, Bash enables me to do what I want with my OS. But still, your comparison quite cuts it. ;)
Hell, The Onion is using it. That's a pretty high-profile editorial site, even if it's funny editorial.
http://buytaert.net/tag/drupal-sites
The worst thing of using any CMS for a site is that you eventually end up stuffing the information you need into a model someone else thought would fit you. Results are so friggin' miserable that one's gonna puke when they see them. âoeSo, what? But we have managed to set it up in a week!â
No, wait a moment.
In a site that is sexy to use, the content is dominating thing over all other things. The designers really work their asses to make the best presentation for that content, so that there is nothing extraneous left. What good is a login box on a, say, nuclear plant site? It's managed from within company's office anyway, why would you ever expose this kind of stuff to average Joe User?
When you have a CMS, you're treated like a child. Here, you have those neat boxes, move them left, move them right, put in the center. What? You want your breadcrumbs styled some other way and integrated into your main menu? Be prepared to a coding nightmare. You want no boxes whatsoever? No way. And after some time, your brain turns into a box.
This sucks. Rape information to stuff it into boxes or whatever format the CMS forces on you. Makes hard to find what you want, but what the heck, that's teh almighty CMS and we the authors are dumber anyway.
Micro$oft: What are you going to smoke today?