New site
I decided to take the time to update my website. Nothing was getting done with the old site and it was primarily due to the problems with composing new blogs (more on that later). The new site has, I think, a better look and feel and lets me do things that my previous site wouldn’t let me do or would only let me do after a great deal of blood, sweat, and tears that culminated in a solution that I found less than satisfying.
And that leads me to my discussion of Joomla. Those of you who know me, I’m fairly technically saavy. Administrating Joomla was an out and out nightmare. I would not recommend it for the following reasons:
- Terrible site administration: The metaphor for content on Joomla was atrocious. Positioning items was a work of art rather than a basic task to be performed.
- Open Source? Yeah right. The basic back end of Joomla is open source and that’s to their credit. It’s a very complex system and allows you a great deal of freedom to those who are interested in maintaining it. However. Doing anything beyond what Joomla’s backend is programmed to do, however, requires you to go online to find a plugin (mambot, component, extension…….the addon process was confusing as well.). The best plugins were fee-based; there seems to be a growing industry of creating plugins for Joomla.
- Themes: Themes are irritating as hell. For one thing, the default themes are broken. I had a blog entry break the width of my blog. Finding other themes was hard because they didn’t always follow the standards so it was hard to adjust to what we wanted the page to look like.
- Updates? Horrendous. If something went wrong and you went off the page or it didn’t sucessfully upload the blog entry, then Joomla cleared the blog entry! Jess tried writing several times and after her last blog entry went away w/o submitting, she said she wouldn’t blog anymore until it worked better, which is why we’re here.
Again, these are complaints I have in general w/ Joomla. It’s a fine product for what it’s for but for people who are just casually interested in updating blogs, etc. it’s not a particularly good system. For people that want to go all out, see how the pages are rendered on the screen, and have complete control over their system, it’s great. I just want something that I can post my thoughts to and so I’ve moved over to Wordpress. It has add ons and plug ins that are appropriate to what I want and need and it is infinitely easier to post to. (I’m writing this entry from an application call Qumana, which lets me post without even going to my admin page.) Let me know what you think of it. Additionally, I’ll be re-posting my old blog entries in the next couple of days/weeks.