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41

I do agree each cms is a tool and you should get one that meets your needs.
OCportal meets all my needs and more. They work very hard on making it work for every one, mainly by making it very customizable.
I will admit it does not have very many themes but I my self am working on making a few although not very fast as I am no expert on making skins and more or less learning as I go but you have to start some where.

I will admit there are 2 other cms that come close to offering what I am looking for in a cms. One being mkportal and the other being bitweaver. Bitweaver runs very well and has a lot of the same features as ocportal and also does lack themes, one of the things it falls short of is forum integration which I need.
Mkportal on the other had does have the forum integration and also has a lot of the same features but its biggest drew back is it is a cpu hog as well as does not work very well for people using a mac.

42

I understand what you’re saying, Bunnykins, but that’s not exactly what I meant by “choosing the tool to meet the requirements”. What you describe are “your” requirements, but every project is different and the tool should be selected to meet the technical/functional requirements of the project and the usage requirements of end users.

Since most systems are very customizable, they will work in a variety of situations but no system can work in every situation.

An example my make my point more clear. If you are building a blogging site, WordPress and TextPattern are good tools to consider (among many others as well). Joomla, in my opinion, would be a terrible choice because it is not built for blogging.

Or, if you’re building a Social Networking site, WordPress, TextPattern and Joomla are all poor choices. In this instance I might look at something like Dolphin by Boonex.

(I have intentionally avoided mentioning Drupal since I have not done any implementations).

If OCPortal, Bitweaver or any other system is part of your toolbox, that’s great. But to select the tool before gathering the requirements is rather like putting the cart before the horse (just my opinion, take it with a grain of salt).

I tend not to go into any project with any tools pre-selected. I first gather the requirements, then search for tools that meet the needs of the client and end users. I will sometimes review a dozen systems before making a recommendation. It is not uncommon for me to have to learn a new system specifically for a project.

I regularly scour the various CMS sites to at least be aware of as many systems, both open source and commercial, as I can. I think this makes me better able to serve my clients. I think web professionals limit themselves and under-serve their clients by being a “Joomla-guy” or “Bitweaver-girl”.

43

Yes when I looked for a cms I had a list of things I needed.
Thats how I found ocportal in the first place.
I looked on hotscripts, opensourcecms and a few other sites and tested a few that looked like they met my needs, I then created a huge list of cms’s and after I looked over the list I started testing each one and seeing if I could make the site I set out to make with it. One of the tests did include joomla, it had so many features in the admin section but only did one thing articles so I dropped it.

I am a girl but I am not a bitweaver girl. Nor do I consider my self a ocportal girl. I really like ocportal and want to share it with the world.

44

hi,

I use joomla for my site www.webapprater.com

It is powerful. With it’s powerful community and club templates it looks great. With joomla running a website is easy. I installed the native joomla 1.5 and started to add content in an hour. Great community and good templates. Give a try before going furthest.

45

I have used Joomla extensively, when it first came out it was pretty special but by todays standards it is outdated and clunky. The only really good point about it, is the site is coded fairly simply, so it is easy to hack about.

The worst point about Joomla is the templating side of things, I am constantly adding modules to add a small bit of content or an if statement in the template, you just should not need to do this in a CMS.

Try using CMS made simple, it is an awesome CMS really easy to add content, but the back end is a little more complex, but any user can pick up the templating pretty simply and the level of control you have is amazing. Just built a client site with it, the majority of the development was just adjusting the modules through the tempate.

I am also a big fan of word press, really easy to use loads of free modules and it is awesome for SEO.

I have only had a brief look at text pattern but I was pretty impressed with what I saw, probably worth investigating.

Stay away from Joomla save your self some head aches and a lot of time.

46

I’ll second CMS Made Simple, with a caveat.

Its great for users, but the documentation for the API is non-existent. You have to familiarize yourself with the whole codebase before you can do any serious development. the codebase is small, so this is doable, but something to think about.

47

Nicely put :smiley:

Something we should all be reminded of when we start cursing because that complex piece of code we’re using (that cost us nothing) requires a little tweaking. I’ve done my share of cursing at Drupal’s theming engine only to step back in amazement on finding that the solution is right there in front of me but I was heading down the wrong path because I didn’t understand it well enough.

BTW: I abandoned my CMS a few years ago. It was light, flexible and worked quite well but when I discovered the feature sets of Drupal, Joomla, etc… I realized that I just couldn’t keep up and while there were hundreds of developers putting out modules to extend popular CMS systems, there was only me to extend mine.

48

I love my hammer. It’s a very nice, fiberglass-handled, rubber-gripped, hardened-steel hammer. It fits very nicely in my hand. It works very, very well - for driving nails. But if I need to loosen a screw, tighten a bolt, saw a piece of wood, it’s a lousy tool. Does this mean my hammer is inferior?

49

Nope… It means you need a Leatherman :smiley:

50

Nice one, awasson. :slight_smile:

51

Can you explain that a bit more (give me an example)? I find adding a module is far easier on the customer compared to them ringing me up and have to charge them 100 bucks to “add another little bit of content”. Modules are wonderful, flexible things and all (I hope) the major players have them (going by different terminology of course). Also, as an implementer of a site template for a customer, putting “if” statements in is part of your job.

52

Niiiice :slight_smile:

53

I’ve been making some awesome sites with Joomla and love it. Template over-rides make you create something that doesn’t look like a cms site @ all.

But clients find it very hard to update. It just doesn’t make sense to them. It makes sense to me to have content in articles, modules and components. But it just does not to non techies.

A tree view on the front page of admin would fix it all.

If there was an artcile associated with a page, then it would have the article in the tree for that pages. If there were modules on that page, then it would display the modules for that page. Still have them where they are as it makes sense to separate them, but Joomla really needs to find an additional way to display that info to non-tech users.

Thanks… :slight_smile:

54

You could roll your own Admin template that changes the look an feel of the Control Panel, or even swap out the Admin menu for something less, er, intimidating. I’ve seen a lot of web shops do that. They re-brand the Admin (because the client doesn’t know squat about what a Joomla is - they just want a web site) and you could trim out some of the fat that is there. Takes a bit of work but can be done.

The main problem is we can’t be everything to all people (it’s always going to be too simple or too complicated). But we have built in enough flexibility so those that want to put the hard yards into learning the system, can actually make is simpler to use for their market base.

I get your point about the tree view, but, as I’ve said before, it doesn’t scale well for the middle-of-the-road website. Sure it’s fine for the 12-pagers, but it gets really complicated really fast as your clients things “oooh, I wonder can the web site do this, and that … and the other”. There is nothing stopping anyone, however, from writing a simple page manager component that black-boxes the menus, sections and categories from the uninitiated.

55

Something I didn’t really mention is the article, and this responds to some of the “I prefer to roll my own CMS” comments, is that when you choose a prominent CMS like Joomla or Drupal, you get “books” that you can buy and stick under your clients’ noses (include it in your fees). That saves you a lot of time and resources when trying to support your clients.

If you roll your own, then remember you have to write all the docs yourself and you get no community to support you doing it. Similarly, if you choose a relatively unknown project, then you are relying on a handful of people in the world that you can support you. A classic example would be if you are on twitter, scan the joomla posts (or drupal). Lots and lots of activity (and I might even catch your post - was able to very quickly help a lady out the other day). Scan for #fredsSuperCMS and, ah, well, you might be feeling rather lonely.

56

I prefer wordpress over Joomla

57

Ok if I wanted a second area to template in cmsms I would add something like this to the template (Which you can use the built in template editor not flashy but no need for ftp)

{if $page_alias=yourpagename}{content block=“neweditablearea”}{/if}

Now the client will have two wysiwyg areas to add content to the page ‘yourpagename’.

the worst part about using modules is that they are messy when you need to look at a site someone else has built, I find I have to look at the html then the temlate to find the module position and search through the modules.

Cmsms also has global content blocks much like joomlas modules but it also has user defined tags, where you can just add php straight into your template orr you could add php straight through smarty tags. This is the real power of cmsms you always have several different options to get to the end result.

Andrew I suggest you try out cmsms you will see for your self that it is far superior to joomla. I do hate joomla but I find it pretty easy to use and customize, just cmsms is so damn simple

58

BIG DISAVANTAGES OF JOOMLA: the layout (legoblocks) is totally table-based (I thought we were supposed to leave that behind?) The editor that comes with Joomla generates DEPRECATED HTML CODES (font face … imagine).
Most people won’t be able to make their own Joomla layout, so you’re totally dependent on templates.
Conclusion: Highend php driven, but crippled by lego-table-blocks. I keep wondering why everybody is so crazy about Joomla.
Okay, it’s a breeze to change the looks of a site, by using another template (can be done in 10secs). Making forms and polls is also very easy. If you don’t mind being dependent on the table-based core and templates. Why not?!

59

One post on sitepoint? Where do these misinformed Joomla haters come from? For your information, Joomla is not totally table-based. If you know what you’re doing, your site can have no tables at all. Check out the source of www.full-life.org, built with Joomla 1.5.9. It also validates for XHTML 1.0 Transitional.

60

Hi shanique. Are you sure you were looking at Joomla? Maybe it was an early version of Mambo (like from 2005)? I suggest you actually download the latest version of Joomla and switch to the Beez template. It’s accessible and relatively semantic.

There are tables in the default template and output, but this remains to provide backward compatibility to the hundreds of thousands of implemented templates. Version 1.6 will be semantic and clean out of the box. When you run a CMS project as big as ours, you have to weigh up your social responsibility when you change things and potentially break millions of web sites. That said, we have a cake-and-eat-it solutions. Out of the box you are compatible with most of the existing template market, but we give you full control over the output. A design shop need only invest a small amount of time once or twice to compile a set of clean layout overrides for use on all subsequent sites. There is more magic that happens with layout overrides so if you want to know more just google “layout overrides” or sign up for one of my training courses :slight_smile:

Bottom line is Joomla let’s you provide the output you want. Whether table-based or not, it doesn’t care nor wishes to enter the debate - the ball is completely in your, the designer’s, court. Version 1.5 fixed that (released January 2008), and fixed it well.

And if you see a <font> tag … sigh … I’m afraid that’s been put in by the author of the content, not the CMS. The only <font> tags we still have in the core are in the Administrator in some very, very old parts of the code.