Joomla?

[telophase]

Anyone here have experience working with Joomla as a CMS?* I'm thinking of using it for hosting a con website next year, and really need to be able to create my own templates, since none of the free ones I've seen do anything other than make my eyeballs vibrate with the SHEER AMOUNT OF STUFF on the page. And I'm sort of mired in figuring out the template system as well as figuring out the CMS all together, and it's making my head hurt for the moment.

I probably won't answer tonight - about to go throw a small load of laundry in, then go smash on Heartless in the Hollow Bastion until it's time to throw it in the dryer, then go the hell to bed, annoyed that I wasn't able to accomplish anything this weekend except for locking Neverland and BEATING THE FUCK OUT OF CLOUD in the Hercules Cup.

* If you have no idea what this means, you don't.

Comments

[oyceter]

Ahhhh, CMS's! I don't know anything about Joomla though, but am commenting just to say I know what a CMS is.

* It is indeed possible that I have too much time on my hands.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Whee! And once I get your hosting set up, you, too, can poke at Joomla and curse like mad! (will try to get it set up in the next day or so)

[flyingpeachbun.livejournal.com]

Joomla.. *curses like mad* XP~~ but I can barely even make a website..soo~~~
I dunno what I'd use it for anyway *stays with the easy stuff*

[telophase.livejournal.com]

A CMS like that tends to be good if you've got a lot of people contributing to one site and need some way to keep them from breaking it, but it really works best with a frequently-updated site, too. And they seem to be mostly marketed to enormous portal sites that are trying to manage way too much information, instead of what I need, which is a relatively small site that has periodic updates from a number of different people. Aarg.

[nockergeek.livejournal.com]

Joomla's a derivative of Mambo. I haven't worked with templating a Mambo site, but I have tried working with the Mambo source code (had to patch a new client's version of it), and I have this to say - if I had a week or two to just dig through the code and become friends with it, I might like it better. As is, there's a lot of shit in there, and figuring out how it all works together is a nightmare when you only have 1-2 hours to do it. :P

If Joomla's anything like its parent project, it tries to have a hojillion features and be infinitely flexible - and is bloated, tricky, and unintuitive to use because of it.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

It absolutely feels unintuitive - right now I'm trying to delete some categories, and it won't let me because it says there's stuff in there, but I can't figure out where the hell to *find* the stuff to get rid of it.

If I can't bash this into some sort of submission in the next month or so (well, it's a small project to poke at in spare time, mostly), I'll have to find something else, because the user interface, where the con staff will update their pages, needs to be as close to idiot-proof as I can make it. Dreamhost hs Joomla isntalled as one of their one-click installs, which made it nice because all I'd ahve to do to update it is click a button, then go remove the installation folder and the app is all updated. Unfortuantely, *my* convenience is not what the site needs to be about. :/

At least I've got until March or April to mess about with it and pick something.