That’s a good example of a nice clean [source code] template 
Well done.
Just one picky thing. For SEO, your footer “Church Web Design by Top Church Websites” should have the link on “Top Church Websites” not “Church Web Design” … at least that’s better for the company that did the web site
Ah, actually, I’m about to tell you Joomla’s best kept secret (so shhhh, don’t tell anyone else).
Put either ?tp=1 or &tp=1 (you should be able to work out which) in the url of your Joomla site and see what happens.
I love doing that when speaking at Joomla Days. Everybody’s eyes go wide for a second and then all you see is the top of their heads because they all scurry to write it down
Ok ok I was impressed I have spent so much time looking for module postions over the past two years. Thanks andrew.
All the sites I have built with joomla that have zero tables, to w3c standards and even one of them was a AAA rated on accessibility. So joomla can do anything, the core is fairly simple to hack to what you want. SEO for the joomla is pretty good too.
I have never been a big fan of the menu system.
Maybe I’ll change my mind when I check the latest updates. but it better be good because I’m still traumatised from making the mambo core total tableless, that was not easy!
It is a lot easier than the Mambo days (I’m still traumatised, hehe). Here are some articles you will want to read that give you the theory behind the layout overrides and customising output.
http://www.theartofjoomla.com/home/6-layouts/16-layout-overrides-popup-login-box.html
http://www.theartofjoomla.com/home/6-layouts/10-layout-override-tutorial-daily-blogs.html
http://www.theartofjoomla.com/home/19-designer/34-template-tip-hiding-joomla-modules-when-a-user-logs-in.html
To be perfectly honest, I do not know of any other CMS that make is this easy for you to do exactly what you want. I am happy to be corrected on that (but if you do, give me technical rebuttal, not just “oh this is better” fluffy rhetoric - in other words, show me examples with code).
Joomla gives your client the ease of use (and all the benefits of a large community - books, resources, local user groups!, events!, etc), but still allows you as the implementer to do some seriously powerful things, even for those “pixel perfect” clients that we all have and, er, love. As far as output is concerned, as of Joomla 1.5, the ball is completely in “your” (the designer’s) court.
Joomla does not have the best looking and biggest range of templates because it’s hard to do. I don’t care you you think they are bloated, some are, fact is though they are still stunning and any good designer can make something really cool without too much trouble.
http://www.ptotoday.com
http://www.outdoorphotographer.com
http://planeandpilotmag.com
http://www.beonliving.com
To be honest when I was playing with joomla I had a hard time finding any free templates tons of $50-$100 ones, but free was hard to find.
I don’t mind paying for a good template I will use for a while but so many times I download a template and use it for an hour and decide it will not work that would be a drag at $50-$100.
That is one thing about Drupal and Wordpress they have a “community” that creates templates not a few entrepreneurs try to make some cash.
I have never heard the term “ease of use” associated with joomla…
I can work with Wordpress and Drupal just fine,(and love them both) It took me about 30 hours with Joomla to be frustrated and had enough, Joomla is not user friendly, I’m sure most of my clients would NOT be ok with it or fine ease in it…
Can’t win em all.
Use CMSMS the templating is all done with smarty, so if you wanted your output to be in a table no worries if you wanted it to be all CSS2 fine. Most modules have their own template too so you can quickly and easily modify the output to how you want it.
The thing that got me hooked was the templating for the menu, it easily allows you to add smarty if and else statements to add on different classes to menu items, so if you wanted to highlight an active page no worries if you want to highlight an active parent it just could not be easier.
I will say the community for joomla is huge there is a lot of help out there and cmsms’s community is just not as good but most of the things you will want to do are easily handled by just using smarty in your template or one of the pre built modules I could not rate it highly enough.
http://www.simplidesign.co.uk/stpatrickschurch
This is the very first site i built in cmsms it took about 25 hours including design, I spent a long time with the calendar module and sussing out the cms. I think now I could turn a site like this around in 15! Every area is editable and easily too, I have not got sef urls turned on i did not know how to do this at the time but it is very easy to implement.
This article is really too basic - anyone with a bit of mind can do it by himself. You should not have focused so much on “installing” but setting up menus, using pictures, organizing articles, etc. Anyway good that you mention joomla - I have also tried it a few months before (check out the lynda.com video series) and despite the tons of really amazing templates that joomla has and its basic slightly bit more user-friendliness compared to drupal - I still sticked with drupal. In my opinion joomla has a more design-oriented community (or entrepreneurs) and its users like that it can be put to good use in a few hours. Compare that to drupal where you have a longer learning curve. I also do not like that joomla has a very very simple user role system. I know about the community builder extension but it looks so bad that I could not get myself to go over it.
Also we have the silverstripe CMS which also looks amazing and it already passed its v2.3 version.
In my opinion these 3: drupal, silverstripe and joomla are the best. So pick one that you can wrap your mind around quickly.
@Johnny
This was the first article about Joomla on this site, so it’s appropriate to start from the beginning (and thanks for the compliment - my intention was to be very basic). Even at Joomla events we get people that have only just discovered Joomla and find this sort of article helpful. But that aside, I was really restricted by the word limit to pack too much more in. Now that the installation is out of the way, I can certainly go into the magic of menus and modules and components. That’s where the real fun begins.
I’m really surprised, though, that people think Joomla has more entrepreneurs. Drupal and WordPress are far, far more commercially supported than Joomla - trust me. We (Joomla) certainly look after our entrepreneurs and probably make it easier for them to be seen and heard, but we certainly don’t have more (in number or capital volume).
I’ve never been a big fan of the smarty templating engine. Personally, if you want to go with a funny markup syntax, stick with PHP (which we’ve done, based on the way PHP Savant does it). You get better performance (because things like smarty just compile into PHP anyway) and really the learning curve is a much of a muchness (I know some people rave over smarty - hey, that’s great, knock yourself out if it works for you).
The best, in my opinion, templating engines are those that are 100% XHTML compliant. We have a guy working on a very promising system.
Good introduction article.
All CMS’s solve some problems, create others and leave some untouched. It’s just their nature and the groups working on them. I appreciate everything they do.
I’ve done a lot with Joomla including managing 200 customer sites, writing extensions and hacking both Joomla and other components.
I’ve contributed a lot to the Joomla community but, I became a little disenchanted in Joomla 1.5 which seemed to make the system harder to use rather than easier. By harder I mean less configurable, components were horribly slow in upgrading their 1.0.x code and the code of the components that did exist still required hacks to core code to make them work. Throw in the lack of a more than decent ACL and I was forced to revisit my own CMS and upgrade the code to PHP5, Zend Framework and yes…Smarty.
One cool thing that happened was I could use Joomla 1.5 templates and just replace the PHP tags with View calls and they all worked perfectly. I’m not sure if that’s because the templates were well written or I just got lucky or both.
Anyway, to all the CMS admins, keep up the good work. You’re helping some people get the job done. Cheers
Third-party extension authors that didn’t upgrade to truly 1.5 native also annoyed the living daylights out of us as well, but at the end of the day you can only lead a horse to water. While not popular with the people that don’t want to upgrade, 1.0 end-of-life was set in motion to try and encourage devs to get their act together. For version 1.6, you will have to be doing things “the Joomla way” (no legacy mode to make you lazy) so we’ll probably see slower but higher quality uptake.
Regarding core hacks though, you shouldn’t really be doing anything. Even the better improved ACL extensions can get around most things without core hacks.
I am in love with Joomla right from the mambo days (sorry to put them both in the same sentence) right through J1.0.x. At first I didn’t quite get the J1.5.x but I quickly got over it and now I swear by it. Now I know how inferior the J1.0.x really is.
I’ve used Joomla (and Mambo, before that) for some time in the past, and It helped me a lot. Some things drove me nuts though, like it’s rigid categories structure, awkward menu system, lack of a decent way to control users’ permissions (unless I buy third party systems), and the need to hack the core system every now and then to get something different done.
In my view, there really are many alternatives that are way more flexible, and just as simple to use, if not more, such as Drupal, Expression Engine and my favorite, MODx.
Nice to see you’re still involved in all this, Andrew. I can appreciate the courage/tolerance it takes to stick your head in here. After all, everybody loves to hate CMS’s. (I don’t hate any of them, for the record; I just don’t like any of them, either.)
I was with Joomla back in the Mambo days, and stayed pretty much with it until around 1.5.3 or so (maybe it was 1.5.6, I forget). I still use it from time to time, but I just got tired of apologizing for some pretty serious shortcomings, so stopped using it for a lot of sites.
What are those shortcomings, I hear you ask?
Lack of dynamically built menus. Joomla’s internal reliance on menu itemid’s drove me crazy. Until I took it down, I could show you a site where the same page could have as many as 10 different page titles and/or headings, depending upon what path you took to get there. I got tired of having to explain to a client, “no, if you want that page to show up in the navigation menu, you have to go to the menu now and manually add it.” The only place Joomla seemed to be able to show a dynamically built menu was in the content area.
Ease of use for the end user. The admin screens are a nightmare to try and teach semi-computer-literate users how to use. Remember, these are people who think Word is an advanced-level computer program. Yes, I evaluated the idea of building a completely new admin system for Joomla, but while doing it asked myself the question whether my time would be better spent rolling my own system, as that might also fix the other problems as well, and I knew from long debates in the Joomla forums that the dynamic menu issue wasn’t going to get fixed to my satisfaction anytime soon, and probably never. There’s a lot of needless complexity in the admin area. I’ve had two clients come back to me and tell me to rip Joomla out and replace it, because they didn’t want the management headaches any more. (Oh, and yes, I’d given them both training and books before this point. The simple fact is clients aren’t willing to invest the time it takes to climb a steep learning curve anymore. In fact, they get hostile, accusing me of trying to lock them into my pet software so they’re dependent upon me.)
The page editing system was way too cumbersome. Even when you clicked the edit icon on the page in the front-end, what you got presented with was the back-end editing page, and that sight frightened a lot of my users. They just wanted a single text area and maybe some formatting buttons.
MooTools also caused me a few minor issues; I was used to using jQuery, and maybe prototype/scriptaculous in projects; having my CMS force me into yet another js library was a bit irritating. But that alone wasn’t enough to make me walk away. The main issues in that decision I covered above.
As of when I left, it was still not possible for a stock install of Joomla to avoid some tables (the banner module was a particularly bad behaver in that respect) and the menu module had to be corrected in order to produce valid XHTML code (if a submenu was empty, it still emitted an empty list, which is not valid; every UL must have at least one child). After talking about these features, one of my last posts to the forums showed a way to fix these issues; hope somebody did, whether they used my code or not is irrelevant.
Other than that Joomla has come a long way from where it was when I got there. I liked the new templating system; oh it was a bit convoluted, but no more so than Drupal’s or anyone else’s, for that matter. I wish there was something you could do to make Joomla “feel” lighter than it does, though.
From the moment you first open the hideously busy admin area, you start to get intimidated by the complexity. I think addressing that should be priority #1. Just like when WP went to Happy Cog and got an admin redo, you’ll antagonize the ones who spent time getting used to the old way, so you might want to keep “admin classic” around as an option, but do something to clean that system up.
Thanks for your comments Arlen. I guess my only reply is Joomla can’t be all things for all people. We have noobs that just “get it” within the first hour, and very experienced people that just refuse to come to terms with it. I guess the main thing for implementors is fit the right application to the right client.
I can also understand what you feel are short comings, but implementing those would result in compromises. For you frontend edits though, it’s not difficult to do a layout override to taylor the edit screen for every client’s needs. I’ve had plently of clients myself where “just ignore the field” doesn’t wash - just do a layout overrride and you are fine. Really that’s the best we can offer, power when you need it, but if you have to dumb it down, you can.
Regarding the menus, well, it’s a problem that needs a completely different paradigm to improve (again, possibly with compromises). I think the auto-menu builders are fine for the WordPress kind of systems, but that’s not what Joomla is or wants to be. There is no simple way to auto-build menus in a rich MVC based platform (without having build rules that are more complicated than the menu manager itself).
Having done some spelunking in the core, I agree the menus objection I have would require a great deal of work; that’s why it was the major dealbreaker for me. I couldn’t find a simple way of getting to where I needed to be without making enough changes in the core to make future upgrades a nightmare.
I’d disagree that dynamically built menus are only for a light-duty system. Contextual menus are almost a user necessity for navigation within systems of any complexity, and making their continuing maintenance a manual process renders them weak in complex systems, precisely the area where light-duty systems start to break down.
If you’re running a multi-author site with any sort of distributed workflow, it’s inevitable that someone will forget to add a freshly-created file to the contextual navigation. It’s a simple process, exactly the sort of thing a useful system should automate.
But this was all hashed out in the Joomla forums some time ago; you won’t change my mind and I won’t change yours. So we agree to disagree agreeably. Every design decision, while opening some doors, closes others. With Joomla, the itemID design decision closed the door on dynamic menus, beyond certain simplistic instances.
In discussing several CMS’s I once termed Joomla “the best of a bad lot.” I still feel that way. It’s an extremely competent system, within its limitations. In some ways, I’m still fond of it (the template overrides added to 1.5 were superb, for example) and I still have some clients that declined to “opt out” of it when I gave them the chance, so I expect to continue to use it, in some small way. It’s just not something I can in good conscience recommend for complex site architectures, because of the labor-intensive navigation tools.
joomla : the best way of the updating of your site and time saver too.
Joomla is really the very best CMS I came across. I am working with Joomla since last 2 years. It’s really very very confortable for both developers and users.