I have been learning Joomla, a really powerful web site content management site. Even though I am a software engineer by trade, now selling software instead though so my skills are a little rusty, it has not been the easiest road to travel.
The Joomla Logo
It is not that it is incredibly hard to use, the issues are that it does take quite a lot of getting used to because somethings are not terribly obvious and some things really are quite awkward. For example, menus are a bit odd until you get used to them and widget positions were a bit of a mystery for a while.
On the difficult side the editors are not yet anywhere near as good as the local PC web editing tools. i know that is not surprising but it can be frustrating trying to get a page to layout, using complex merged cells in tables, the way you need to match an old site. I guess the moral of that story is do what works naturally well rather than trying to match legacy sites.
But, after a few niggles, it is really starting to come together. The system is incredibly powerful especially with the addition of a few well placed plugins. You can even have a fully working social network embedded in your web site. I chose to us Jom Social (http://www.jomsocial.com/) for this and Agora’s forum tool (from http://jvitals.com/ ) for an embedded forum.
The biggest problem i had was getting a template that was just the way that I wanted it. I solved that problem by buying a copy of Artisteer ( http://www.artisteer.com/ ) . A visual designer for templates that is easy to use, powerful and requires no knowledge at all of difficult things like php.
If you want to see how i got on, here is a simpleweb site for a Steiner school i did – it’s a copy of an existing site but tidied up and with the huge advantage that several people can now update it as required. At the time of writing it was not live hence the temporary URL:
http://host.quksdns.net/~iona/
I have to say, I am rather pleased with the results I have achieved using Joomla.
