Joomla! gets the flick
A few years ago, I’d actually looked at Mambo (the CMS Joomla! derived from) as a possible platform for the web-design company I ran with a friend of mine. It was quickly apparent that this system was bloated, un-focused and very difficult to use - so I left it in the dust and never looked back.
Having worked with Joomla! for around a year (in my current job), I can honestly say that my first impressions were right. :P
That answer probably wasn’t the one you were looking for… But, needless to say, Joomla! ain’t so hot. It is bloated, un-focused and difficult to use and a fair amount of it from a programmers perspective goes against “good practice”.
Late last year, I had this great idea that I would start writing some articles about Joomla! development to help those in the community, but the more and more I think about it, the less I think that that will actually be beneficial. At this point, I think the best way I can serve the PHP community is, in-fact, to point you away from Joomla!
So, no more articles about Joomla! development… Both Joomla! and PHP, for that matter, are becoming more and more dissappointing each day I use them and my plan over the next year is to start over and learn a new language - one that has the power and performance of PHP, but something with much more finesse and polish as a language.
When I learnt how to harness the power of CSS my life was happy, but when I had to start dealing with Joomla! and its’ ignorantly developed code that happiness faded. I want to be happy again…
Update Wednesday, 24th January 2007:
I should probably clarify that I am giving Joomla! the flick where I can… I am still technically a Joomla! Developer at work and will continue building Joomla! extensions for a while to come. :P
January 24th, 2007 at 10:41 pm
In my business from around 2005 I discovered a lovely open source CMS called Mambo, I would be able to ‘easily’ make content management systems for clients with most of the framework already in place. I managed to port over two or three client’s previous websites (that were just static pages - yuck) into it so they could make changes but I came to realise doing all over this wasn’t all that easy to do. Whilst some things took a bit of learning (read - mistakes) to get my head around in general it worked and that was about it.
Mambo’s development team then left and started Joomla, same code different goals. It all looked very promising. Now in the past 2 or so years there really hasn’t been many major needed changes to Joomla like I was hoping on. Things such as SEF URLs, proper XHTML usuage and code that would past most web ’standards’.
I started to realise just how much time I was spending trying to get basic things to work in Joomla such as modules that always had slight incompatibilites, getting any kind of SEF component to work with Joomla and the already installed components and also those lil ’special’ things clients request that would be a 5 minute job in php but you end up spending an hour trying to work out how Joomla does something just to achieve that same task. A lot of the time I found myself even hacking the core code (naughty) as a last resort such as just to get rid of the standard tables it would use for headers and content. And then when a new version comes out you cant upgrade without remembering what you changed.
The other thing that brought us to the point of stopping using it was the amount of resources it would take on our server to achieve what could be done in something 1% the size of the install. Whilst Joomla does have some code in it, in my opinion it is very bloated and for most of clients websites we were using probably about 10% of the functionality which is just a big waste of space and time as it would take significantly longer for a Joomla site to load then one of our own customised CMS solutions.
Another problem is that it isn’t too ideal of a setup for an owner of the site use to actually manage the content. It really pushes them to use the Admin Backend which I don’t like the idea of as it can confuse some clients and is best to let the administration flow with the current layout of their website.
I think we wasted too much time trying to ‘work with’ Joomla that could have been spent doing our own system in the first place that would suited 90% of our current clientbase. Thankfully we dont have too many clients left in Joomla these days (around 5 or 6 off the top of my head) but one thing about learning Joomla that has been an asset is doing work for the Toowoomba City Council as all of their sites including about three that we have worked on are all in Joomla.
Like yourself we don’t ignore the clients that are currently using Joomla or request it, but we will pursue to persuade them to get out of it and show the difference and advantages in using our own customised solutions which include factors such as easy for the client to use, more cost effective in long run (extra addons take less time to develop for it) and quicker loading times. Usually this is enough for them to veer away Joomla.
January 27th, 2007 at 5:42 pm
And how do you feel this effects the company ?
February 2nd, 2007 at 10:44 am
Drupal anyone?
February 2nd, 2007 at 7:59 pm
Drupal? eh… Apparently it only just lost out to Joomla! in some CMS award, but I’ve looked at it and it just doesn’t seem right somehow. It definitely doesn’t have a “PRO” look to it.