I started using Joomla just a little while ago and put together a site for a network of people who help others find financial freedom. With all the hype behind Joomla I thought it would be a breeze, now I’m wishing I just built the site myself because of all the headaches.
The site is http://monsterincome.com and it’s active and everything but there is just some stupid little things that I can’t figure out like how to change the favicon image. It took me a good 2 hours just to figure out how to change the copyright on the bottom of the page since there was no way to do it through the interface.
Does anyone use something along the same lines that has a more friendly interface?
There are better CMS apps I suppose. Because you purchase them, you don’t need to mess with the branding that comes along with the freebies. (though IMHO, it’s a fair deal).
Replace the “favicon.ico” file in the joomla_install_dir/images folder if you want a different one.
I agree with you. I tried Joomlah once for a small site and got so frustrated that I just deleted it all, went back to Dreamweaver and built it from scratch. I guess if you do not know how to build web sites then Joomlah would be great.
I didn’t like Joomla’s templating system and lack of customisation and after one year I switched to Drupal (http://drupal.org/). Everything you can think of can be themed with Drupal, there are also many modules available to customise it more but if you go to Drupal be prepared to spend at least 3 months learning the system but in my opinion it’s worth it. But simple things like changing the favicon and changing the copyright information can be done easily in the backend.
Another CMS solution I recently came across but haven’t had the time to test is SilverStripe (http://www.silverstripe.com/)
Etomite, which MODx was based off of was another good lightweight one, but the project may be slowing down or dead…haven’t checked on it a while.
If you’re looking for something that is relatively simple, highly flexible with an eye to subscription based stuff…especially online newspapers/magazines or journal type of stuff, Campsite is right up your alley.
Then again…CMS Made Simple has themes ready to go and, well, it is simple. Even says so in the name.
I’m in one of my test phases where I’ve been checking out several. Drupal was the first one I checked out, but too many quirks/bugs in the admin interface for my tastes. I’ve been looking for simpler solutions that are still robust enough to extend with my pretty basic PHP skills, though WordPress is what I spent the past year + learning.
I’m thinking I will move to Plone and work on my Python a bit as it seems a solid solution for both SMB and enterprise level sort of projects while continuing with WordPress (as it is the blogging platform of choice) on the side. The elusive lightweight CMS…I’m still debating that one myself. I had thought of Joomla…but it just isn’t very lightweight. Still shopping around there, just as you are.
I agree that Joomla is user friendly. I mainly had a beef with output. But, it has been over a year since I last used it. Have they gotten rid of all the nested tables and such, or is that still in the mix? If they’ve taken it to standards compliant output, I may have to revisit Joomla.
For those in the know, How would you compare Drupal to Ruby on Rails? I’m going to invest in really learning one of these having given up on (Dot Net Nuke) and would like to know which would be more advantageous to learn (or learn first).
Check out [B]Textpattern[/B], the most flexible CMS I’ve ever used. It’s not a fully-blown CMS like Joomla or Drupal, however it’s quite powerful and from the link to the website you’ve mentioned, it perfectly suits your needs.
