Welcome to the Personal Website of George Michael Huff
Learning Joomla!
By George Huff
Currently I am trying to wrap my head around Joomla!. Certain things seem fairly straightforward, certain things I am finding ridiculous. Perhaps my biggest gripe is the fact I like to develop table-less standards compliant websites, and Joomla! spits out all kinds of crap. If I ask to have a menu split out in a flat ul li structure, it puts it inside of a table. Why?
Joomla!’s biggest pitfall as so far has been how it’s built for yesterday’s web. There is very little documentation online about how to change the guts of Joomla! and what gets spit out. I hope to change that as I go along. I have spent quite a bit of time figuring out where to get rid of the unecessary tables.
A few things:
I don’t know php, but I can hack my way through it, copy, paste, and delete.
I could purchase a ready built CSS standardardized template ( which populate the top 100 google results or so) built by people who have already gone through the painful process.
I’m not going to do that.
On the positive side, it does offer a great content management system for the end client. It’s pretty and easy to use once you get through initial structural hurdles.
So anyhow, I will be blogging through learning Joomla! as a webdesigner.
If anyone knows of a CMS that is opensource, developer and client friendly, and think I am wasting my time, shoot me an email, george@eleven3.com.
Until then.
BTW. Just ordered a book on Amazon. I’ll write about it after a bit of light reading.
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Welcome to the Website of Eleven3. I like to build clean websites, period.
This Is George Huff
He is a web designer / entrepreneur / conspirator / blogger / fianceé living in Portland, Oregon.
When not fully immersed building websites, he runs a record label, writes music, throws a music festival, grows vegetables, and happens to be a huge advocate of his friends and family.
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Hadley Stern July 7th, 2006 at 11:58 am
I would ignore Joomla and focus on Expression Engine. It is unbelievably powerful!
George July 7th, 2006 at 1:13 pm
Thanks for the feedback. I looked up expression engine and from the first 10 google results it looks like they are comparing it to movable type. So is it more of a blogging engine? Or a full CMS?
(Unfortunatly I cannot ignore Joomla at the moment)
Bluesaze July 14th, 2006 at 10:45 pm
I am sort in the same Dilemma, You could make use of the Run Digital 508Hack it removes all the tables. Downside is it supports only Joomla 1.0.7 and not the latest 1.0.10, but since 10.0.10 is a maintaince releases it doesnt matter matter much. Or go get Drupal. Why go for a commercial CMS when there are so many excellent Opensource CMS available.
George July 18th, 2006 at 3:41 pm
Ahh, I see. I thought Joomla! was an opensource option?
There are some weird things about Joomla! that are set as default. I had to find a plugin to give me SEO friendly page titles. I’m still not sold. The unfortunate thing is I had to put my learning on hold for a week, and now I am dreading picking it up.
rickey mccoy October 4th, 2007 at 8:16 am
I’m with Hadley on this one. I’m a very avid Joomla user because it’s very simple to use its dynamic abilities. However, in order to customize , it’s a beast. But with Expression Engine it is very simple to use your own CSS and its’ {exp:} language to make all sorts of cool things in your CMS. It also allows you to make custom lists for your end user to input information. Joomla makes you use pre-defined list fields in your content areas. I’m gradually switching from Joomla to Expression Engine.