Got Anything to Say About Joomla?

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• Yea, baby! You gotta do Joomla! It absolutely rocks!

  Now, Joomla! v 1.5 is just about ready for Beta 2, there will be a few weeks of testing, then we roll into Release Candidate, then 1 1/2 years of steadfast refactoring into a MVC framework can be ALL YOURS. For, yes, *free*!

  You can learn it now - the user interface will not change drastically, but, wait for the new release.

  I have TONS of Joomla! reading on my blog - here is a recent article I did on the coming release. Also, you will find information on my blog about Jake, a bridge that allows CakePHP apps to run unchanged inside of Joomla! as a component. So, you've got another entire army of geeks developing for you.

  1,400 extensions available for Joomla!. And, we keep getting closer to 100,000 forum IDs, meaning, you'll never be more than a stone throw away from someone who knows Joomla!.

  Lastly, Tucows has always been a favorite spot of mine for years. You need to do Joomla!, because it would make me, very, very happy!

  ...Oh, and, you would be happy, too, but that is kind of besides the point, isn't it? ;-)

  PS - there are many Toronto folks doing Joomla! and they are planning a Joomla!Day get together in May, I believe.

• @Amy: Thanks for bringing this to my attention.

  @Joey: I'm a Development Working Group member for Joomla. I'm here in Barrie, Ontario. I'd love to give you a hand if you need it. Cheers!

  I've been using J! for a while now on many sites of my own and I do like how easy everything comes together. I'm also an Avid user of Tucows Services!

  Cheers,

  Jay Kendall

• As a long-time Joomla! user, I can wholeheartedly endorse Joomla! for your project. Whenever anyone asks whether or not they should use Joomla!, the first question I like to ask is, what type of site do you want to run? You're one step ahead of me, because you have already listed your requirements. I'll take them one-by-one and give you an idea of how Joomla! can meet those requirements.

  "...a place where developers...can get documentation"

  There are a number of ways you could go about this. For one thing, you could use DocMan, a document/downloads management system built for Joomla! You could also enter all of your documentation as content items into the core content component. The options are really limitless.

  "...download client and example code"

  Here, you could use the aforementioned DocMan as a downloads manager, or you could enter the code into content items. There is a plugin that helps automatically format code snippets so that it is more easily readable for your visitors.

  "...look for information on a wiki"

  There is a component for Joomla! called OpenWiki which is an integration of DocuWiki into Joomla!. The main Joomla! website uses it for documentation.

  "...read news and announcements and so on."

  Joomla! was built to handle news and announcements.

  Like Amy said, there is no shortage of people knowledgeable about Joomla! to help you if you get stuck. Just login to the forums, and don't be afraid to ask questions.

• I was on a team using joomla to develop a version of nzhistory.net.nz in late 2005. and found Joomla pretty good to work with. Very powerful out of the box, so to speak.

  The site editors loved the back-end tools. They created hundreds of articles a couple of weeks.

  Template integration was very easy in 90% of the cases, and it wasn't terribly difficult to modify the joomla code to implement the trickier stuff required by the templates/client.

  Documentation wasn't awesome back then, but the dev community was quite helpful.

  If you're only going to be changing the default templates and installing a few extensions, then I expect you'll enjoy using Joomla.

• Take a look at drupal if you want to scalable and robust CMS, and which is much easier to bend. A ton of open source projects (like KDE, Gnome, Mozilla) use it to run part of the development infrastructure. drupal is better at community features that joomla, and it looks that that is what you are looking for.

• I use Joomla! to do all my sites now - the key benefit is the ease and speed of installing fully integrated extensions such as forums, directories, ecommerce, etc. and there are now nearly 1500 extensions so whatever you need there is generally something which will do what you want - even if you need to hack the PHP a little. It has very good workflow management for sites where you have a lot of contributors who can all have author access and then an editor or publisher can review and sub edit items as required. The visual templating support is excellent and enables consistent presentation to be maintained with multiple authors. It took me a long time to learn as the official documentation is not very newbie friendly, I solved this by writing a book :-) which you might find helpful - it is at http://www.learnjoomla.co.uk

  Hope this Helps

  Best

  Mike

• Joomla rock. :D

• Drupal is great, there is no doubt about it! Joomla! has Community Builder and also Groupjive which do a great job with community building. Drupal has a fabulous community and it is another solution you should look at. If you use an open source solution, you are making the right decision, IMO.

• Drupal is definitely a good option, but I don't think it is the best fit for what he is trying to do. I think Joomla! would be the easiest way to get the site up and running fast. Drupal has a steeper learning curve, IMHO.

• Disclosure: Joomla Evangalist Approaching
  Well, there is hardly much to differentiate between drupal 5 and Joomla 1.5 right now. I think it would come down to 2 things.
  1. If you need a complex ACL structure, go with Drupal
  2. If you want to be able to have more flexibility in skinning it, go with Joomla
  A side note is people say they prefer the Joomal admin interface, but that's persoanl I suppose. Download both and suck it and see :)