I have been working with Joomla for over three years now and recently my love for it as a CMS has started to fade. Now I’m not sure if its the CMS thats annoying me or the feeling that a bespoke solution to content management would make thing a whole lot easier?
One thing I do know is that for rolling out a quick site with some sort of content management then Joomla is the right route to take…once you get to grips with its templating engine within a few days you can have fully functioning website with content management that the client can update easily.
Most of the time you will find a client thinks “I need to manage my own content” but in reality only a small percentage of those actually go away and update their site on a regular basis (is this down the sometimes complex administration panel to a less computer literate?). In that sense are you missing a trick by using something so bloated as Joomla when all they want to do is add a news items every couple of weeks?
Do we really need to go to the trouble of setting up the system which out of the box does alot of things that the user is never going to use… its a bit like buying a car with all the added extras but you never use them!
Then comes the sceniaro where by a client wants something bespoke like a gallery/calendar etc … Joomla has plenty of components which easily install granted, but half the time they do a basic job and you end up having to hack the f*ck out of them to get them to work in the manner that the client expects.
So would it be quicker to build the bespoke CMS on a client by client basis in reality probably not… Most clients don’t have the budgets for some development team to sit for a few weeks developing something bespoke. I guess it comes down to a toss up of quickness of deployment and money, if those two things are a priority its hard to look past Joomla as a solution (maybe time to research some other options drupal etc?). Maybe more details from the client are required as to what they want to update before you jump onto the CMS out of the box.
Not quite sure where I am going with this post I love Joomla to bits for what it can do. It’s just recently I have felt that it has been holding me back from delivering some nice solutions to clients problems that could be solved with something built bespokly instead of being limited to the walls of Joomla!
Bell needs to speak up more!
Using Joomla for personal sites defiantly a thumbs up for using it there. For business use I am yet to decide?
Post by: Richard
Tags: Content Management, Joomla