Php Cms

[jkpescador]

Anyone using a PHP CMS?
What is it?
Was it easy to install?
Was it easy to customize?

So far we are considering Drupal and Joomla.

[scrivener]

I'm playing around with Joomla for a certain non-profit organization I'm part of. I really like the spirit of the development team and the community in general, although I must say that since so much of the application of a CMS is business-related, the community tends not to be quite as warm and loving as, say, the WordPress community or the phpBB community.

The learning curve is quite steep. Installation is easy, but management, once you get everything installed, requires a new vocabulary ("front page" doesn't mean anything remotely close to what you think it should mean) and the administrator's interface is confusing to navigate.

Additionally, I do most of my web-stuff with Safari, which doesn't handle JavaScript very well, and most of the administrative buttons are JavaScript.

Themes are easy to play around with -- almost as easy as with WordPress and definitely easier than with phpBB -- and there's no lack for free and for-pay themes and modifications.

I won't give you the URL just yet; I'm still working on it and besides, what I've got up isn't too far removed from what came out of the box. I'm worried about what the administrator interface is going to be like for some of my users (I have one person lined up to manage one module, or section, or whatever the heck it's called in Joomla!) and another to update another section, and neither is very experienced with this kind of thing.

I'm very interested in managing CMSes for some other non-profits and plan to spend hour upon blissful hour this Christmas break really getting up to speed.

Have you got a project in the works?

[zztype]

I have a little bit of experience with Joomla / Mambo. If you'd like me to help with your system, let me know.
Blaine

[craigwatanabe]

I have absolutely no idea what the heck you guys are talking about. But if it's SAP, Great Plains, or Mirror Pond then yeah let's do lunch :D

[glossyp]

The better half used Mambo/Joomla to build everybodyeats.org. He built a custom php cms for hawaiidiner.com and it is so much easier to use from my point of view (I do all the content management). As Scrivener mentioned, the Joomla was super fast to install but the steep learning curve on the back end has been a real challenge. Also, Safari and Joomla don't play well together. Everything I do with the everybodyeats.org site I do in Firefox - it cut down on the frustration.

[jkpescador]

Thanks for all the info.

This is for work. In many cases, the solution comes down to a contenet manager to help out the agencies.

I probably should set up a contenet manager for stuff outside of work as well. It would help to manage some of those projects by giving more people the ability to help out.

One friend likes Joomla. My neighbor likes Drupal.

I'll let the group know what we do. It's good to read all the experiences from sys admin to users.

Mahalo!

[pzarquon]

Say, jkpescador, did you ever come to a decision? Scrivener, how's your site coming along?

I'm considering playing with Joomla for a site I might build for a local group. The "teaching others to use it" challenge you've mentioned is a concern, but I also expect I'd be doing most of the updating. I'm just curious about your thoughts as to its usability from the random visitor's standpoint. Is it intuitive? Does it organize your content well?

I know people are connecting other software to it, from Gallery 2 to the Simple Machines Forum package. How seamless, relatively, is it to "add goodies" to it? My instinct would be to install those sorts of things separately, but integration, if done well, could be a huge improvement.

[scrivener]

Once I got a version of Safari that played nicely with Joomla, it was a lot more pleasant to mess around with it. However, I realized that I'd spent a lot of time choosing a default template that I liked the looks of without really thinking about what I wanted on the site.

That's kind of a problem.

As you know, one of the nice things about a good CMS is that you can run modules specific to your needs; however, since I wasn't sure just yet what my needs were, I haven't really played around with modules, either. As for existing third-party, non-Joomla compatibility, I haven't even thought about that just yet, but I am interested in linking the mainpage to a forum for registered users; that's probably down the road a bit.

Putting up random silly content helped a lot, as did lurking on the Joomla forum. I'm not too interested right now in creating a custom look -- I'd rather take a nice template and tweak it a bit.

Sorry if this isn't very helpful; I haven't been working on it as much as I said I would! Thanks for the kick in the pants, though. Gives me inspiration to get back on it.

[jkpescador]

Sorry we chose to pay for something. I forgot what it was. I don't have a report on the status either.

[1stwahine]

Anyone care for a Sub Sandwich? I treat! or How'd bout an Iced Mocha from StarBucks? Yummy!!!!

Auntie Lynn :p

[scrivener]

I take back what I said about the latest Safari playing nicey-nice with Joomla. While the Java buttons and stuff worked fine, the WYSIWYG editor did not. I could not make any of the cosmetic and substantive changes with the editor (hyperlinks and italics, for example) with Safari. Firefox works like a dream, however.

I did purchase a third-party component called iJoomla Magazine (http://www.ijoomla.com) and found the documentation quite helpful; there's an online tutorial that is quick and to-the-point, and I'm quite pleased with the aesthetic results.

I still don't have all of the Joomla-specific oddities figured out, but I'm getting them down a few at a time, each time I work on the project.

Some pleasant surprises were the image-manager (multi-level directory management) and the on-board template editor, which lets you edit the HTML and the CSS. For major editing, I still found it easier to use Dreamweaver, but being able to copy and paste into the editor, rather than upload the file via FTP, was most convenient.

I'd say I'm growing a certain fondness for Joomla, but I'm not a devotee yet. However, I find that now I enjoy playing with it, whereas in the past it was a chore. If you're in a hurry to get something up and operational and you've never used it before, I'd say this isn't your best bet. Now that I've got slightly more than a basic understanding, though, it's amazingly quick and I'm pleased with the results.

[Cameron]

Joomla's great, easy to use, as for the wysiwyg editor not working with mac that's normal safari doesn't support any wysiwyg editors as far as i know, nor does Opera.

another great one to use is textpattern, it's a bit tricky to get started, but once you figure it out it's great

[scrivener]

Okay, all you Joomla peeps. I've got a Joomla site almost completely ready to go, but something about the aesthetics is bugging me. Would you please click over to this site (http://www.oahumathleague.org) and look at the items in the left and right panels? How do I put a little space between modules here? I hate the way the items are butted right up against each other.

I'm confident in my ability to modify any of the files, but am not fluent enough in the language to figure it out myself; if you know something to do that requires editing files, I can handle it.

PS: I just realized that most of the items in the right panel are registered-only, so you won't see my problem there. In the left sidebar, however, you can totally see what I'm talking about.

[Cameron]

It’s been awhile since i played with joomla, but if I remember correctly the templates were broken up into two parts the layout and a style sheet. To get more space in those areas you need to find the elements in the style sheet and mess with the padding property, or add it........I can't really tell what’s going on via the source... no offense to pixel bunny whom ever they may be but the coding looks pretty poor.

[scrivener]

I know people are connecting other software to it, from Gallery 2 to the Simple Machines Forum package. How seamless, relatively, is it to "add goodies" to it? My instinct would be to install those sorts of things separately, but integration, if done well, could be a huge improvement.
Have you seen this (http://www.onestopjoomla.com/component/option,com_remository/Itemid,47/func,fileinfo/id,84/)? It's a Joomla/vBulletin bridge. I'd love it if you gave it a try and saved me the hassle! I think I'm going to install and play with JoomlaBoard (http://www.onestopjoomla.com/component/option,com_remository/Itemid,47/func,fileinfo/id,86/) on my OML site. I was going to run with the cool-looking phpBB component, but that was set up for Mambo 4.x.y or something, and with Joomla about to unleash v1.5, I'm nervous about increasing incompatibility. Are you running a forum area on your Lost site?

[scrivener]

I just installed it, set it up, and tested it out. It's not pretty, but I think it will do the job, at least for my purposes! The phpBB interface was going to be a headache -- users have to register through phpBB, which would register them in Joomla. It wasn't going to work the other way around, apparently. That sounds like a headache to me. The JoomlaBoard installation was quick and painless and it runs nicely as part of Joomla itself.

[scrivener]

Feel free to ignore this. I just need a place to vent.

It seems that whenever I sit down to work on Joomla, I just automatically understand a lot more than I did the time before. That part is very encouraging.

The part that is discouraging: I always get to a point where I'm positively baffled. I go to the Joomla Forum, where I read the FAQ, do a search, scour the topics, and find little bits and pieces of info that help me with my task. On rare occasions, I find exactly what I'm looking for and just follow someone's answer to someone else's question.

Occasionally I'll throw a question out there, and it will be answered and I'll hit myself in the forehead and say, "Well, hot duh. What an idiot I am."

But you know, the problem is not that I am an idiot ('though I do not deny that I am). The problem is that the wonderful folks at Joomla (and Mambo before it) named EVERY SINGLE PIECE of the application something that is either misleading, confusing, or meaningless. "Static content" doesn't mean what it sounds like. "Blog" doesn't mean what you think it means. Even "front page" doesn't necessarily mean the stuff that appears on the front page. Tables, lists, blogs, categories, sections, and menus sorta mean what they say, but how they operate within the structure of the app seems completely bizarre, until you ask a stupid question in the forum and someone shows you. Then you think it all makes sense.

Almost everything I now know how to do with Joomla was hard-earned. Much TOO hard-earned. There isn't a thing that's intuitive about it -- not even the WYSIWYG editor. One very helpful document in the Joomla Forum cautions the user NOT to drag and drop images from their listing to the editing window, because while it may LOOK the way you intend, when you view the page, that's not at all what you get.

That's right. Even WYSIWYG doesn't really mean WYSIWYG with Joomla.

I still think it's a fabulous piece of work, and I love the Open Source concept to death. I have paid decent money for components and templates that really do a job for me that I am not smart enough to do myself, and I appreciate that. Joomla makes me look a lot sharper (to the general public) than I really am. I know guys like Ryan and Blaine can tell I'm stealing or paying for just about everything I do, but there aren't too many Ryans and Blaines in my audience, so I'm not worried about that. I'm saying this to emphasize the fact that I do like Joomla, and I think I'm hopelessly addicted (I now have Joomla running on five sites, only two of which anyone has seen yet), but this is beginning to feel like an abusive relationship.

You know what else burns me up (well, a little)? Ryan put up a LOST Joomla and seemed to have no problems with it whatsoever. Welcome to Chopped-Liverville. Population: Me.

*pant* *pant* *pant*

Okay. I think that about does it. For now.

[scrivener]

I'm feeling a lot better, and have mostly got the new Joomla doing what I want. So once again, Joomla and I are an item. Back together again. Reunited and it feels so good.

Those of you who are Open Source whores like me might like the very nice bridges people have built for Joomla and WordPress, or Joomla and MediaWiki. I've got them both installed and running on my new Joomla site (it's a school project), and the Zen of it all is enough to send me bliss-ward.

[craigwatanabe]

Hey scrivener...it's summer break...give the old noggin' a retreat from all dat thinking. Relax...let them neuron's go... :)

[pzarquon]

Glad to hear you and Joomla have made up, Scriv. And it sounds like you've got it integrated with a number of other great packages, doing far more with it than I'd ever been able to attempt.

Any chance we'll all get to see the fruits of your labor?

[scrivener]

I'm planning to play around with Xaraya (http://www.xaraya.com/) over the Christmas break. Anyone have any experience with it?

[GeckoGeek]

Never heard of it. Let us know how well it works.

[jkpescador]

Any updates on CMS's being used?
I just ran into Midgard. I'm not sure how they all measure up. Anyone still using Php Nuke?