Anyone use or familiar with Joomla?

[Thor]

I'm a tech guy not a web dude but my sister has my cousin asking me for help on setting up her new webpage, she's using Joomla and I'm kind of lost

Anyone use this before or even better have a better online solution to build a clean/simple website?

[gottabekd]

If it is for a "clean/simple" website, try Wordpress. Yes, can be used for Blogs, but you can create static pages as well. If you really need some extra features, there is likely a plugin for it.

[Rathji]

Wordpress!

Seriously though, I code all my pages by hand and have never actually done a CMS so I really am the past person to seriously suggest something. We have 2 websites at work: a wordpress site that someone donated the time to set up, and one that is built on ModX. Both function pretty seamlessly, and both have problems that infuriate me at times, but it might just be the implementation.

[Thor]

Just was looking at wordpress Looks like a much better candidate than joomla, she's utterly lost and I'd have to baby her throughout the website development (which I don't have time for.)

Squarespace looks quite simple yet nice too, any thoughts on that?

[worth]

I use Joomla for my company's website. If you have some specific questions I can try to help you. But as the posters said above, I think there are probably some better platforms to build a website on. I didn't build the site with Joomla, I hired a web design company to do that for me. I only maintain the website with Joomla, so there is a difference.

[photon]

Yeha I've done stuff with Joomla long ago, and found it nice to work with. Wordpress is simpler and more direct, and Drupal is even more robust than Joomla.

[MickMcGeough]

Wordpress+++

There's a lot it doesn't do very well too, but as far as free CMS systems go it's my fav. Almost all my client sites run on it in some capacity.

[psicodude]

I have used Joomla quite a bit, and my opinion is that it offers a fair bit more flexibility that Wordpress, but it is exponentially more complex to use if you do not have some sort of web development experience.

[Crazy Bacon Legs]

I'm using Joomla to build a web site at the moment and had to learn how to use it from scratch. If you want to do a lot with the site but still use a straightforward CMS, it is actually really amazing. You can add any number of user-built add-ons, and there are literally thousands of free templates to get you started.

I would recommend looking through this page, and possibly downloading a couple of the guides. The thing I love most about using it is you no longer have to worry about linking up all your pages, nor about the most basic things that you can miss when coding by hand. I used to code by hand, and while you have a lot of control, the time you waste is just not worth it. Of course, you can still tweak the HTML and CSS pages to your liking.

If all you want it a blog though, Wordpress might work best for you.

I am building a rather silly little web site right now on Joomla. It's far from finished (hell, it's barely even started), but you can get an idea of how customizable a page can be. The page is based on a template, but doesn't actually look much like the template any more.

Best of luck with it!

[Russic]

Great thread. I'm about to embark on a Joomla adventure of my own in the next week or two. I've worked on Drupal quite a bit before but in my experience it's a little complicated. Very robust and the features are wonderful, but handing it off to a client can produce some disastrous results.

LOVE squarespace. I'd build all websites in it if I could. Problem with SS is that it doesn't offer the variability when it comes to modules. What it does it does flawlessly, it just doesn't do a whole lot (for instance, no calendar module is the reason I'm working on Joomla shortly).

[Buff]

I demo'd Joomla, and couldn't immediately figure it out so I dropped it. I've used Drupal, and I like it better than Joomla. Thought Drupal was easier to figure out. Have also used WordPress and it is the easiest to use of the three, but you get more functionality with Drupal and Joomla. For a simple site, WordPress would probably suffice. I'm not a web guy, I'm an IT guy so my use with these products is not extensive by any stretch of the imagination.

[llama64]

Simple site: Wordpress > all (quality of plugin code is often very hit and miss though)

If you want something more robust:


I've been working with Drupal for a few years now and it keeps getting easier and easier to use. Does take a good few months to learn how to use properly, especially if you're not a web developer to start out with (I've seen designers break down and cry over it). The latest release (Drupal 7) has gone a long way towards making the entire platform easier to work with. And if you delve deeper into the system, you'll find there are user groups popping up all over the place (such as: http://drupalcampalberta.org/). Calgary's Drupal community is steadily gaining momentum so support won't be hard to come by.

Never touched Joomla outside of a month playing around with it's predecessor (Mambo?) - hated everything about it. Seems more and more developers/shops are moving away from Joomla and embracing Drupal. Obviously I'm a Drupal fan boy, but the difference between the systems is largely flexibility and intended use. Joomla is supposedly easier to setup - but I still think Wordpress handles all simple sites far more elegantly then anything else out there.

As I heard it described recently, Drupal is the Justin Beiber of open source CMS.

Squarespace is atrocious, awful and evil. Use DrupalGardens.org instead.