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I have DIY website build by HTML coding for years. I heard quite a bit about Joomla and wonder what is the advantage of using Joomla
Anyone can highlight ?
[edited by: ergophobe at 9:38 pm (utc) on Jan. 13, 2010]
There might be lots of advantages or none at all.
Advantages
Disadvantages
Hopefully other members will add their thoughts and elaborate on this.
Now whether the advantages outweigh the disadvantages depends a lot on your use scenario. If you have a very stable site that doesn't change much and is maintained by you personally, there might not be much to gain.
Disadvantages:
Truth be told I have been thinking hard of going back to hard coded sites in php. Why, well this forum gets you to be quite focused on the quliaty of you code and semantic coding ...
Depending on the size of your site, a cms can make your life much easier. But if you only have a handful of pages, it may be over complicating things.
I've actually left joomla and went back to hard coded sites, just saves me so much time not having to fiddle with some php or CSS to get everything looking right.
I have two sites on Wolf CMS for example (one a long shot but small one of my own, and one I did for someone else) and it was very easy to set up. Wordpress is also easy to set up for anything newsy/chronologically ordered, ditto a number of wikis that can be used as CMSs simply by restricting editing to yourself.
but have all the power and advantages of CMS...
the best thing is... no need to make any url redirect... i still keep the old url(using drupal URL alias).
not promoting any software... but you may need to try some drupal. best of luck
Disadvantage:
- security, vulnerability - and this single con keeps me away from using CMS.
So, Imfoong - maybe give a cms or two a try; it's possible to run test install on your own computer (you can visit with browser, but no one else sees results).
See how install process goes; can you structure a site, add content?
As to retaining URLs: as well as using redirects, you can structure cms site so the auto-generated "friendly" type URLs for your articles are the same as before the transition.
[I see Drupal has Import HTML module for importing a static site; haven't used it, don't know if it helps with URLs.]
If you don't want "Web 2.0" functionality - visitor comments, perhaps voting and so on, a cms may be overkill.
Personally, I use textpattern for my content sites. It's lean (compared to its 'classmates' like wordpress), mean (you have unlimited control over your CSS and HTML for example) and overall just gets the job done extremely well. It takes some time getting used to, but since I got the hang of it, I have been able to set up 100% custom sites in a matter of an hour (excluding design and content ofcourse).
To manage a static site effectively, you need to have a good understanding of the operating system from a perspective other than an average desktop user. Something that might take a user with intimate knowledge of sed 20 minutes to accomplish can take hours or even days for an average user to do by hand.
However with a CMS, you can setup a generic installation of the CMS and just about anyone can educate themselves about how to use it effectively over the course of a weekend.
I didn't find Joomla to be very intuitive, whereas Textpattern is quite clear. Joomla is complex, as is Drupal, you don't need that for converting a static HTML site. You don't need to know PHP for Textpattern, it uses its own, well-documented, XML style tags for inserting content, menus, and such, into templates.
DisAdvantage
- 10 in short run
- 2 to 3 in long run
Not using a CMS can often be too safe to play and being too safe is too risky for business (in my experience).
A good CMS (I use Drupal having previously tried Wordpress and Joomla) can make it much easier to manage functions I like to use like blogging.
Many of the websites I write are for other people and I found very quickly that other people are quite demanding. Giving them the tools to do their own work and suddenly they are not so demanding anymore.
It does take more to administrate but Wordpress and Drupal are fairly admin friendly. Constant updates and patching can get a little techie though.
I can now set up a CMS in probably only an hour or so more than it would take to produce in HTML. That one hour at the beginning have saved me thousands in the long run.
The primary advantage of CMS in general is that it makes it easier to add content, particularly for people other than the webmaster to add content. The advantage of generating more content faster outweighs any disadvantages IMO.
With open source cms, seems to me you might find core project is developed pretty well.
But with add-ons - some of which are extremely useful - can be somewhat whimsical: a module, say, might appear as creator gets all enthusiastic about it, then receive only few updates or become abandonware.
You can be on cusp of progress, then! - can even help with developments, perhaps "just" through documentation. Yet some frustration is likely.
cms not good, then, if you're set in your ways
I have a Modx site, and I now think it would have been better to build a custom CMS using a framework like Django.
If you do not need that flexibility, then use something simpler.
But with add-ons - some of which are extremely useful - can be somewhat whimsical: a module, say, might appear as creator gets all enthusiastic about it, then receive only few updates or become abandonware.
The really useful ones get forked and continued.
That said, you may well be able to find a CMS that matches you needs closely out of the box, minimising your dependence on extensions/plugins.
[edited by: ergophobe at 6:43 am (utc) on Jan. 20, 2010]
[edit reason] quote tag fixed [/edit]
You raise a good point - most of us are equating CMS with "ready-made CMS", but in fact the first few that I used were simple ones I built myself and though limited in terms of functionality, they were blazing fast and did exactly what I wanted, and nothing more (now I usually use ready-made ones, but that's a choice to put my time into creating content rather than coding).
If you have complex needs and find a CMS that has all the features built-in that would require plug-ins in some other CMS, it almost certainly has many many features built in that you don't want too, so you're back to the out-of-the-box verus Django (or Kohana or Cake or whatever).
Last year I thought I'd give Joomla a try for a new site and it was still too much of a leap for me personally. The advantage that WordPress gave me (for non-blog, non-chronological websites, mind you) was that it was scalable in complexity-- I could start at a low level and work my way up. With Joomla it just felt like there was only one complexity setting: high, and it just didn't seem very intuitive for a newbie. Anyway, that's just been my experience, yours might be different if you give Joomla a try.
This can leave a website in limbo. Especially if the CMS is an all encompassing blog, comment, directory, guestbook, forum tool.
One of my sites was all of the above and I'm glad that I used different CMS tools for each element. After several years of running the site, I have gradually stripped out the CMS functions and gone back to static HTML. Best thing I ever did.
I no longer worry about PHP errors, script security updates, developer forced software upgrades requiring a whole new skin design, and various unforeseen SEO url issues/duplication and so on.
OK, forums can't be done statically, but pretty much all of the major forum programmes seem to have import filters now. So if the worst comes to the worst, a crossgrade may be called for. But for anything else, unless I plan to start adding 5 articles a day, I'll be happy if I never see another CMS again.
With Joomla it just felt like there was only one complexity setting: high, and it just didn't seem very intuitive for a newbie. Anyway, that's just been my experience, yours might be different if you give Joomla a try.
I agree 100% , i never looked at php before i started using joomla. After that it was learning php by FIRE! and lots of sloppy CSS that comes with each theme. Used it alot for a year, i'll never touch it again and im migrating every site i ever used joomla with back to static HTML.
I have the same feeling about drupel too.
Nothing replaced prototyping my website with the different cms's and the critical add-ins. My website (an all-volunteer nonprofit) needed a certain type of organization and presentation that I was best able to achieve with Joomla at the time.
While I hoped that the website would gain multiple contributors I learned two other lessons: 1) I sometimes still wanted complex articles that I used Dreamweaver for; 2) I never got anyone else to contribute articles until I stopped.
I am still happy that I moved this site to Joomla. It took a lot of work but this site needed the interactivity, rss feed, etc. But, I would not consider it for a simple site. I will investigate some of the suggestions from other responders.
