dmccants - 22 May 2007 02:29 PM

What about Joomla?

I know EE is great, but it costs $$.

How does Joomla compare to it?

I set up a Joomla site about a year ago. It was very time consuming since I elected to “customize” the template, which is not recommended for your first site. Pick a template you can pretty much live with to get started. I do like the control panel and the features it provides - relatively easy to add new content quickly. For what it’s worth, here is the link for my Joomla site, which is basically a hobby site (car club related).

After doing a fairly extensive CMS review, we’ve found that Joomla has a significantly higher learning curve for new users, leading to additional training and support time. Also, if database replication is required at some point (for scalabilty), you’re out of luck with Joomla as well. You’re limited to the performance of the single DB server.

It’s a great tool with plenty of add-ons and a good community around it but it’s not a catch all.

Bottom line - do your homework and know what you need the CMS to do before diving into any one of them.

Great points Tripp, and I definitely agree. After my experience setting up the first site, we haven’t used it for client projects. There are far better solutions depending on the purpose of the content and the project budget. You do get what you pay for with CMS.

My experience with Joomla was brief and frustrating. It seems to me that Drupal has the momentum at this time. If you have some basic PHP skills Drupal will “make sense” as it is based on PHP. I have a couple of Drupal test sites and it seems like it’s going to work nicely for me.