![[decorative element]](http://designorati.com/wp-content/themes/d3/images/nav1_topics_OFF.png){kind=small}
Joomla! Content Management System: Making Open Source Proprietary
When complicated Open Source Software has no documentation and is supported by an elitist clic community unwilling to help new users, is it still Open Source? Or, is it a different kind of proprietary?
Question: What happens when programmers go it alone, running their own company, without administrative oversight, a documentation team, or a perspective grounded in the markets served by their product?
Answer: The Joomla! content management system.
Joomla is a new open source content management system. You may be more familiar with Mambo, named “Best Open Source Software Solution” at LinuxWorld Australia. For the last few years, Mambo has been highly regarded as the best. Joomla effectively is Mambo. In August 2005 the entire Mambo development team walked out on the company and formed their own, carrying the Mambo code with them. After integrating already planned Mambo enhancements and bug fixes, they dubbed their repackaged CMS Joomla.
Both systems are, by all accounts, solid, stable, reliable systems. The problem is, they’re written by programmers, for programmers. Mambo has better help and resources. As of mid-2004, it allegedly had actual documentation team, although their efforts (if any) are not apparent on the official Mambo Web site. Joomla has even less (read: none), despite listing two staffers as co-leads of a documentation team of two (it’s unclear if these are the same two people that formed Mambo’s documentation team).
Joomlout of Luck, Pal
Mambo’s site has a few meager Flash tutorials that explain how to write an article or swap pre-created templates, but no where on the site can most new users find instructions on how the system works and how to customize it. But don’t say that to the Mambo or Joomla communities! They’ll bury you in links to novice-level, generic HTML and CSS coding articles that are little more than over-wordy rehashings of posts to A List Apart and WebDev.com. Both Mambo and especially Joomla poorly choose to let their communities document their products through crowded bulletin board forums, and the communities are themselves programmers. To them, “customization” and “layout” are synonyms for CSS (an apparently new concept to the shared Joomla and Mambo community), and “structure’ means CSS floats and making sure the DOC TYPE heading is correct. Asking the question of how to customize a template so as to include or alter the positioning of certain types of content is invariably met with responses like: “Change your presentation by altering how it floats in the table cell. Use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Here’s a link to a CSS tutorial on floats.”
Joomla’s site lists on every page a link to a lengthy style guide to help its team write articles conforming to the company standard, and they also link to a brand manual; yet the Help section of the site doesn’t even link users to a function reference. Instead, you’ll find this minimal nugget of information buried in the Downloads section of all places. But don’t actually look for it there; it isn’t linked from other pages in the Downloads section, which focus solely on smoothing the transition to Joomla for existing Mambo users (new users be damned apparently). I found the File and Function Reference page by crawling through the forums—one post linked to another, then to another, then, eight links deep, on a post totally unrelated to function variables, I stumbled across the link to the File and Function Reference. It was given in response to a question that had nothing to do with the contents of the link, not only demonstrating how ineffective Joomla’s peer help can be, but also how difficult it can be for anyone to find information in their forums.
Good luck finding definitions and allowed variables for Mambo and Joomla functions like mospathway, mosLoadModules, and mosCountModules—this last one no one, not even the development teams, seem able to explain because all the forum posts asking for a definition begin with “I think…” and usually contradict each other. Because there are so many confused people in the forums who typically post the entire contents of their index.php template, searching on just a function reference like is impossible. Even if the search doesn’t fail with a warning that the search was too broad, you’ll get hundreds of messages in the results—most having absolutely nothing to do with the definition of the function. What is “user1″? Judging solely by the code of the default index.php, it’s some kind of container. Currently it holds the “Latest News” section of default Joomla and Mambo Web sites. How “Latest News” got in there is unknown because the admin CMS does not list user1 as a module. Nor does it list user2, user3, or user4, all of which are present in the default template and which contain different types of content (user4 contains a navigation menu!). After a few hours of digging you’ll discover that the last part of that reference, “-2″, is one of six esoteric codes that determine whether the content of user1 is to be wrapped in HTML table code of various styles, empty DIV containers, or nothing at all. (I’ll save you a few hours: -2 specifies no containing element.)
Frustration levels are high because these CMS systems are widely regarded as the best, but the available help is arguably the worst, as one user recently discovered on the Mambo forums when he asked simply for an updated manual. In that thread, the helpful forum veterans zeroed in on specific terms while ignoring the poster’s real question. One has to wonder if the respondents were too busy to read or were simply employing that time-honored Internet tradition of dazzling with bullshit to cover up the fact that they didn’t know real answers. The questioner was ignorant of the Mambo and Joomla lingo—as any new user would be—so respondents dragged out the pointless and repetitious discussion for 45 posts before someone finally told him to go buy a book.
In that thread, the questioner became understandably frustrated. He obviously had a short fuse, but anyone would have blown eventually during that discussion. Regrettably, he’s not alone in finding no help among the allegedly helpful communities. Searching the Joomla forums for the word “frustrated” returns seven pages of results. That’s twice as many as a search for the string “what AND mosCountModules” (”mosCountModules” alone errors out as being not specific enough).
Next, The real price tag of Joomla.
- Arguing on the Internet
- In-Source, an Online Home for In-House Creatives
- “Smasher” Gets Medieval On Font Suitcase Problems
- Xara Takes on the Giants with Xara Xtreme for Linux and Mac
- Mobio Joins Mobile Marketing Association to Help Improve Mobile Content Experience
- Scribus Team Announces Version 1.3.2
- Bruce Fraser, Photoshop Pioneer, Dies
- German Newspaper Live with K4 Publishing System
- John Nack Comments On Photoshop CS3 Beta Program
- Do You Know Where Your System Info Is?
Thanks for rubbishing the efforts of the new Mambo Team,it really means a lot to us who are struggling ourselves to learn enough to be able to support the Community well.
Some of us have put all else in our lives on hold to try and salvage what remains of this beautiful system.Also out of passion for Open Source.
We fight daily to improve things - note,no mention in your article of the destruction of many highly-educational threads which would have been invaluable to us relative new comers.
Reading your article was the end to a perfect day,actually.One in which we’ve been accused of not caring about the future of Mambo.Not understanding Open Source.Not being suitably qualified to be able to assimilate legalese.Too incompetant to lead our own destiny.
By whom? The very ones who pissed on Mambo in the first place and have been gleefully plotting its demise ever since.
Rack off and play with your Joomlas.
Oh,and for the record,The Gent aka thegent is a red-blooded male.
I suggest you edit your article before he gets very,very annoyed with you.
Im not here to state the faults of this article, neither rant on things i dont really give a f*ck on, thing is, this article sounds ridiculous everyday as Thegent now dances his feet to the mambo tune.. he’s one fast learner mambo-ing now.. now i’ll shut up before i make ur article famous.. U HAVE A NICE DAY PAL.
and another thing.. dont you know how many people find help in the Mambo Forums? care to do some statistics? Media reporting isnt just about babbling things, have u heard of “Research”? support your bullshit with numbers, insights are just for artists, we’re on a technical world here.. :)
Sure the documentation could be better. But then to tie that to some form of “cost of ownership” argument
and suggest the lack of documentation makes Joomla! or Mambo propietary is flawed. Both Mambo and Joomla! offer powerful software that busy people can use to power their business.
And your use of apostrophes could be better.
CORRECTION
In the original article, the noted Mamboserver.com Forums writer was referenced as “she” when, in fact, the writer was a he. Gender-specific references to that individual have been corrected in-line.
DESIGNORATI
LoneRambler,
I sympathize with your bad day. Instead of becoming defensive, wouldn’t it be more productive (and conducive to making more of your days good) if you asked why so many complaints are being made about Mambo?
Could there be some truths to those criticisms—or, in the case of some, perhaps the complaint itself is false, but indicative of a real issue you on the Mambo team can address. The matter boils down to a question: Are all these people completely wrong, or are there legitimate issues with Mambo or something related to it?
If the latter, the most productive approach is to ask yourself how you can work to address the concerns raised by the complaints.
DESIGNORATI
Arpee,
“this article sounds ridiculous everyday as Thegent now dances his feet to the mambo tune.”
If that’s true—and we’ll see when he returns my e-mail—then it was not because of the help he received on that forum, which was the point of that passage of my article.
So, the greatest argument against my entire three page article, is that I mistook the gender of one subject referenced in only two paragraphs. That clearly implies your complete agreement to the rest of the article and all the other points it raised. Good. I’m glad to hear that.
DESIGNORATI
Iain:
Really? So, if the time invested in training and building the user’s site isn’t related to the costs of ownership, how do you define cost of ownership, then?
DESIGNORATI
Arpee, again:
“as Thegent now dances his feet to the mambo tune.. he’s one fast learner mambo-ing now..”
Really. Again, that would be without the blessing of the Mambo community.
To wit:
Keith123456:
You, Arpee, wrote:
Again, in lieu of documentation, is the advice to “venture”.
Obviously you’re trying to help the man, Arpee. And, obviously, theGent has a low frustration threshold and is quick to vent his frustration on respondants. These are problems, and the treatment he receives on the forums as a result is partially deserved. But, only partially.
The Mambo community members who have responded to theGent are too quick to become defensive. Most importantly, they don’t offer the man any real help; he asks a straight forward question, and seeks a straight forward answer. What he gets in return are short-hand answers understandable by experienced Mambo/Joomla users, not newbies. That’s the crux of the problem with the Mambo community—as a whole, you are not friendly or helpful to newbies (note, again, you are personally more willing to help than others, Arpee).
You pointedly illustrated the fundamental flaw in the Mambo forum community when you told theGent in the same thread:
When a group is willing to freeze out an accepted member (you) just for offering help to a new one (theGent), that is not a friendly community. It’s an elitist clic.
The thrust of my article was two points: First, that neither Mambo nor Joomla have even rudimentary documentation for their products (beyond how to navigate and utilize the admin UI); second, that the communities that support those products are unhelpful, unfriendly, and elitist. I proved both points, and you and the others above validated them with the commentary here.
The first point is a problem that rests solely with the respective Mambo and Joomla teams. Unless you are an officer or employee of either company, you have no reason to grow personally defensive. Afterall, this isn’t a discussion about Mac vs. Windows or Red Sox vs. Yankees (getting defensive on these topics would be equally inane, which is why I mentioned them). Now the second point of my article, that the communities are unhelpful and elitist, is within your sphere of influence. You, Arpee, appear to be more willing to change the forum community for the better. Unfortunately, your genuinely helpful attitude is among the minority.
Argue with my article all you like (but please actually argue the points, not typos). Ample supporting evidence is available for any objective observer to see simply by following the links within the article (note: I include the links to Mambo’s and Joomla’s home pages). No one should ever believe an editorial opinion—least of all one on the Internet of all places—without doing his own research.
DESIGNORATI
You are clearly extremely out of touch with the inner machinations of The Mambo Foundation.
I am not even going to massage your ego any further by arguing with you.Moreover because I have faith and belief in my peers as well as myself,I have no need to defend just plenty to prove.
I know my own heart and mind,I have no apologies to make for my drive and what I have accomplished in my life.You can trash my efforts to your heart’s content.You have utterly no idea what a force of nature you’ve crossed.
Boy you are going to see what the Mambo Community is made of! Of course,you have a personal obligation to heap derision upon a spirited group of human beings who are giving themselves to the world - if that’s what makes you happy,go for it.
I wish you the best of luck in making a name for yourself.
This is the official voice of the Mambo Foundation, is it?
No, Mr. Burke does not know the inner workings of the Mambo Foundation. Only those within the Mambo Foundation do. Don’t be daft.
You just don’t get it, boy. Open source software should work because it is open source and makes adoption easy. Mambo does not.
For the record, I am an expert Mambo user. I know what mosCountModules does. I spend a lot of time on the Mamboserver forums helping other people (under a different name). Mr. Burke is absolutely right in his assessment of them and of the demonstrated efforts of the Mambo team.
I couldn’t just leave it that.
If you pull your head out of your ass for a minute you’ll figure out the real reason a journalist would write an editorial like this. Mr. Burke is trying to help the Mambo Foundation and Mambo users.
Some people are punks and will beat up on others on the Internet. This is not such a case. Designorati is not some personal blog, and Mr. Burke, if you bother to check him out a bit, is no bully. He makes valid points in his articles and inspires others to think for themselves.
You would do well to take note of the fact that he compliments Mambo and Joomla! for their methods of content management. Also note how he ends his article:
Clearly the man likes what Mambo does and how it does it, he just calls you out on the fact that you haven’t got enough resources to help people learn it. He is not heaping “derision” on you, he is pointing out the flaws in what is otherwise a remarkable product. You should be grateful for the input and learn from it.
Instead of making pitiable and puerile threats like some fitting child, you should ask the man for his help. Obviously he has experience in online publishing and project management. He just may have some insight into how the Mambo Foundation could get its documentation together and keep it fresh without piling more work on yourselves.
I’s rico from the Mambo Foundation. I also run a Mambo-oriented web design company: Water & Stone.
I frankly don’t see why a lot of the posters are giving the author a hard time. He’s spot on about the docmentation on both projects. I just got back from speaking to users a LinuxWorld and The Number One complaint is that our system is under-documented. My company has a competitive advantage over a lot of designers strictly because we’ve been doing Mambo for so long we know what can be done — whereas a noob doesn’t stand a a chance (check out www.3dallusions.com for example of how much flexibility you can get out of Mambo). We also are able to build pure CSS compliant templates, which a lot of people have a hard time doing because they simply don’t know what this or that class does (or should do!). This has to change.
In an Open Source project Docs is the ugly step child — the job is just as big as any other but half as glamourous. No one seems to want to do Docs. (At least Mambo is getting to the stage now where there is some commercial documentation is in the market.) I wish I could say “hey, we’ll have this sorted out for everyone in the next 6 months” but I can’t make that promise. Are we, as a Team, aware that there are major shortcomings? Yes. Are we taking steps? Yes. When will you see some results? Soon, I hope.
Everybody Mambo!
I’ve been reading the trend of this dicussion with high interest. Also I read the pointers to the information Pariah posted in his own article. It’s been a real education.
And, foremost, I’ve got to with a great deal of relief say that with the last few posters (Ricoflan, Colin Wills) that it’s clear that the grown-ups have at last shown up. Their words are like a dash of cool water.
Some time ago, someone much older and wiser than myself once said that you have to get ten “Atta boy!”s to make up for just one “Aw, Crap!”. Simple experience has shown it to be the deepest sort of wisdom.
I don’t know if those first impressions are the killer, but if the first impression is a bad one, I’ve found it can be salvaged–but not if you keep making it over and over and over again. And that’s exactly what the Mambo/Joomla team has been doing.
Now, I understand what it must feel like to attempt to communicate with someone you feel must not be listening to you. In my current day job ithappens over and over again. It’s frustrating, I understand that.
If I may be just a bit presumptuous, the reason the Mamboers are on the net to begin with (or at least one of them) is to make some sort of economic way with it. “Is OSS ready for the enterprise” is a question that keeps being asked. This is the arena you are trying to make your way in.
Pariah may or may not be “the enterprise” but he certainly is entrepreneurial. He has certain needs in his activity and the CMS is not just mission-critical, it’s mission-crucial. Like it or not, you have to appeal to people like him. He’s not demanding the universe, just something thats ready-to-start-with, and adequate starting documentation. If someone like him can’t find it, you have to point him to it. If you don’t have it, you should be crafting it.
Above all you should never, ever react like stung schoolchildren. You may be 1337, and you may have programming gold there, but if you don’t polish your own presentation and make it as easy as you can to get on board you just have a huge, expensive hobby.
My personal style is about as dissheveled as it can be. But even I have a $500 suit in the closet. The point is that, no matter how 1337 you are, you may be able to bust the most brilliant code on the planet, but nobody’s going to want to deal with you if you insist on being a slacker in a button-down situation. We see honored slacker geniuses in the media, but that’s largely a legend; the reality is sometimes you have to dress up, play nice, and be kind to the obnoxious newbie, at least as much as you can.
‘Thegent’ may be just Mamborific now. Calling that a success story misses the point. The point is, that he had get into a heated, personal argument with the Mambo team before he got stuff running, and, if indeed he is really running Joomla, he had to do it largely by himself.
Have updated, easily accessable, and understandable documentation for beginners. And, if team members are easily frustrated, designate team members who specialize in public contact. Do this, or expect to be ignored by potiential users who just do not have the time nor the inclination to ‘figure it out themselves’, because there are plenty of CMSs out there which may not be 100% ideal, but definitely don’t have to be argued about to get going.
DESIGNORATI
This article is right on the money! And it needed to be said.
The documentation at both joomla and mambo is nothing short of pathetic. When the former mambo (now Joomla) developers threw a spanner into the works of what was a decent CMS (i.e. Mambo) they should have removed the spanners from their asses first.
Semi-competent self-important programmers aren’t usually armed with the requisite project management skills to progress a project of this size and scale. And their efforts to date on Joomla showcase this lack of broader business accumen.
What they have managed to deliver is buggy baggy saggy software with nothing more than cosmetic modifciations made to the mambo core since the split. The upcoming modifications in 1.5 will force users to decide whether they are mambo or joomla users. Users will not notice any significant changes in the functionality of the joomla CMS, but they will be forced to make modifications to their templates and files thus ensuring that they are left with no choice but to become joomla adherents.
Joomla documentation…….Style sheets TODO…. Basic Templating TODO…. No upgrade since the split from Mambo. Incompetent……. Absolutely!!!
And just to prove that I’m not one of the previous mambo-posting sycophants I’ll state that categorically - Mambo is no better! In fact, it may even be worse. The projects got all the legs of a horse riddled with bullet holes trying to swim across a stretch of ocean.
Mr Burke’s right on the money. Give me proprietory software anyday. After all, if time IS money - the sheer volume of raw sewage that you’ll have to wade through to use either of these CMS’s will cost you plenty.
For anyone thinking about using either Mambo or Joomla, I recommend you forget about it. Turn off the lights on these two! They’re both in the death stages of their lifecycle.
Pariah, I think this is the best article in our field I’ve read in a long time. And it’s unique, as far as I know. Congrats on being the first to spot the naked emperor and write about it.
I spent weeks investigating Mambo vs Joomla for a project late last year, and in the end I had the same reaction. It’s enough to bring any CMS wannabe to their knees. Not much on Amazon either … I bought the lone Mambo book they had and it was barely better than the online labryinth.
“Joomout of luck, pal” … best subhead ever.
AM
AMC:
I dunno about that. My candidate was “Joomlain’t my content’s daddy”, but that’s just me…
DESIGNORATI
Burke you are ok, everything you told is apsolutly true.
Best regards from Croatia.
I think a web site on web design that has:
a) A fixed 800 x 600 resolution layout, inflexible to other resolutions.
b) Five hard-coded width columns stuck in this narrow space.
c) A main column that can only display seven or eight words line.
d) The color scheme most frequently selected by teenage boys entering puberty.
Is the real joke, here!
I feel like I am gazing through a very long and narrow peep-hole! Hello!? Perhaps some of these columns could collapse? How about giving me a choice in resolution? Yowza. What trailer trash! Hun, you need a lesson in web design!
Say what you want, Pariah, about documentation. I am calling you out, though, on your article title “Joomla!: Content Management System: Making Open Source Proprietary”
Pariah do you know what the word “proprietary” means? I realize it probably carried a certain tingle that made you giggle like a school girl when you toyed with various biting, nasty clips to accompany your scathing “article.”
According to Webster, proprietary means “owned by a private individual or corporation under a trademark or patent.”
Mr. Web Maestro, sir: Are you accusing Joomla! of violating the GPL?
I just want to clear some things up:
1. The mambots have been renamed to plugins.
2. There IS documentation. It might not be a full blown MSDN Knowledgebase, but its far more than a lot of other projects have to offer.
3. There is an extensions site on joomla.org where all the listed extensions have a description.
4. Changing the layout of a webpage can NOT be achieved without knowledge of HTML and preferably CSS.
5. CMS are not intended for the newbie that wants to build his common homepage with it, they are intended for complex websites.
6. I am not a smart man, but I was able to get my site up and running in about 2 hours. So I don’t understand your bitching about this.
7. There are a LOT of errors in your text. If you write again about something like Joomla or Mambo, I would suggest you do better research.
Joomla and Mambo are frameworks. They are only intended to give you the minimum of functionality at the start but the maximum for coding. Thus the idea is that you HAVE to extend it with the extensions available over the net. See it like Apache. A framework with little functionality in it self, but a lot of modules that make the most powerfull serversystem out of it available in the market.
For the people complaining here: If you have a problem, feel free to ask in the forum of joomla.org. Please be patient and wait for an answer at least a day. Minimum. If you don’t get a proper answer, you may contact me by PM. I have the same nick in the forum as stated above this text. I will gladly try and help you with your problems.
Pariah, your article is spot on! There is a lack of documentation for both Joomla and Mambo. However, this is also true of most open source projects. Creating documentation takes time and with projects like Joomla where there are frequent updates and releases I dont know how anyone would be able to keep manuals in line with the pace of change.
It seems like the folks at Mambo have heard your message though. They are promoting a new site on the old forums. Its hard to tell if this is an official move away from the Miro-owned forums or not but the emphasis of the new site seems to be on providing reliable information and documentation. They say they have just started their online manual (its a wiki) but if thats true then they have done some very good work.
I only saw the announcement yesterday and the forum sure wasnt moving then, but there is quite a lot of useful information there to get people started and the wiki shows a lot of promise.
Its at http://mamboguru.com
Paul,
That’s excellent news! Thank you for letting us know. I’ll check out the new Mambo resource shortly.
Hopefully the Joomla folks will take a cue and follow suit to the benefit of users and would-be users.
Amy Stephen and Hackwar:
Thank you for providing the inspiration for a new editorial.
DESIGNORATI
seems ironic that an these 2 community oriented content managment systems are having so much trouble getting their content (documentation) organized…
I can agree with a lot of things Pariah says here. My company has been using Mambo and later Joomla when it came out for about 2 1/2 years and roughly 85% of all of our work is related to it. I have to say that for myself, it took about a year to really figure out what was going on with the system, how to use it for what I need, and how to figure out what’s happening when things go wrong.
That said, my company doesn’t offer help for using Mambo or Joomla to clients becaue it’s just too time consuming and complicated. I’ve seen several of our clients wandering around in there helpless and frustrated by the system and I can totally understand why. The terminology and administration control panel are utterly confusing and it’s difficult to see a relation between what you put in the back and what shows in the front.
A good basic documentation for non-programmers is absolutely essential for this type of thing and sadly it has always been lacking for this software.
As a small pick, I’d also like to point out that it’s not necessary to have a module to make a component work in the front of the site, as the article states. The components show in the main area where the articles show, so it’s only necessary, in the majority of cases, to point a link to the component to make it show.
Hello Everyone,
Nice information and philosophical perspective on the alleged documentation effort for Joomla.
Having left IBM in 2004 after 11 years of service working in IBM Support, IBM Services and IBM Development I have felt the pain associated with this new culture of inept programmers/developers of all flavors and variety.
Having worked with 3270/5250 products and the subsequent, or inevtable integration into the Websphere Application Server and Portal Server products it became very clear that the lack of vision for this new breed of developers had reached critical mass and had saturated the entire company; executives especially. Get it to market regardless of quality. Because IBM has endorsed the “Perceived Quality” model as opposed to REAL quality, the ramifications have run rampant throughout the technology sector.
IBM, not unlike Joomla expects the customer to bear the brunt of debugging sloppy code and also expects that customers should be creating their own documentation. The difference in this regard is that to get IBM Websphere Portal installed and functional you are going to need about 4GB of RAM on a Solaris or AIX box with a pricetag around $400k for the hardware outlay, then you are going to have to pay the for the software which at last check ranged from $280k to $500k +/-. Now, given the fact that none of their systems work together, and the fact that none of the administrative task work together and the fact that they normally ship their products with greater than 250 known defects; the customer is hanging out there with greater than a million dollars hanging in the balance for something that does not work as advertised. I did not mention security because I am not sure that IBM, Sun or Microsoft have the first clue as to what security is and how it should be implemented. But that is another topic.
So Joomla, and its predecessor Mambo are a pretty good deal dollar wise even with NO Documentation. That is why I use it and set others on the same path.
It is just sad that the worldwide development community has lost touch, focus and vision with the thing that puts butter on their bread; a happy customer that can actually use their product.
Afterall, who if not the developer of a component or module could best describe how it works, the intended use and how to actually use the bloody thing?
Thanks for the insight, you guys have hit the nail on the head in my learned opinion.
Best Regards, Allen
Good article, but some of the folks won’t get it anyway…
The problem with many open source software is that there are just too many simple coders. Few or none appaerently have ever heard about professional “software development”, which includes much more.
So, unfortunately, open source software has found its own limits, much more quickly than I ever thought :-( This isn’t just the case with Joomla!, it’s with 99% of all OS projects.
Spot on with your article Pariah. I’ve indeed spent a number of weeks trying to get joomla to do what i want it to do. I note that some in this forum have said that cms’s are not for newbie’s. I completely disagree. the whole idea of a cms was to make content management simple and easy. having said that i accept that you have to get your hands dirty occasionally. I just can’t accept that you have to know three programming languages and have a comp sci degree to use them. When there’s little to no documentation for a cms like there is with joomla it really frustrates those of us who don’t have those comp sci degrees. I’m sooo frustrated with having to spend three weeks ‘trying to get it’. well written.
mg
Very interesting read, and although I now use Joomla on a few of our company websites, there was a learning curve - as with anything. I found the forums helpfull and the over all tone of the people that help, friendly.
I must admit I did not have trouble ‘figuring’ it out. Although I agree with alot of the article - I find the overall tone quite negative and wonder if the author has actually spent 2 hours playing with the CMS? Best of all it is free?!
As for this web site - it might benefit from a better template as the text was almost impossible to read and I had to increase it 3 fold, making all the google ads completely unreadable. = what a loss that was. Anyone have a paracetemol?
Also couldn’t post this message 1st time rount - shall try once more
Funny you say that the learning curve is so hard. I suppose when you first opened photoshop and read the help section there you knew everything about photoshop. I been using photoshop for 9 years now and I still learn something new every week.
I am in the process of learning Joomla and I am far from a programmer. This is my first attempt at learning any type of CMS. The nearest I came to a cms was with Macromedia’s Contribute and that is really a long reach and I know that.
When I started learning things. I usually didn’t know either anything or very little at first. I then spend time (sometimes a little , usually alot) learning the subject.
Joomla is free and just like other Open Source Projects. It has the ability to bring out people that can make things to make it better and charge and that’s cool too. If I have to figure my time into the cost of the project, then ok. That means I figured the cost of learning into all my software I had to learn. Photoshop cost me$400 and over the years of learning it I probably now really paid $3000 for it. Since I use it alot I know it pretty well. I hope to know Joomla as well in the future as well, along with other CMS’s I am trying to learn.
Peace to you, I just found this site yesterday and was enjoying going thru it until I read the joomla rant. Still enjoy the site but we’ll have to agree to disagree on Joomla is all.
By the way, There is so much more information now and more added all the time.
Robert, thanks for adding your opinion here. Discussions would be boring if we all held the same point of view, wouldn’t they?
I’ve been seeing that, yes. This article deserves credit as one of major inspirations for the sudden appearance of the information you’re finding—and that was the main point of this article.
For the record, yes, I have worked with Joomla. Although I worked with it throughout researching and writing the above article, I actually went much further after publishing this piece.
In fact I tried to use it on a professional content site. I taught myself Joomla (the documentation prompted, in part, by my article hadn’t begun to appear yet), and even tore into its PHP code to learn how certain front end and admin features worked. (There were certain aspects of Joomla I could not find a way to learn without examining the PHP code; fortunately, I’m quite comfortable with PHP.)
After 92 hours of working with it over several weeks, trying to mold it into a professional content management system, I abandoned the Joomla option. Joomla just plain isn’t ready to manage content on a real content-driven Website.
Among numerous other things it just doesn’t do, or does incorrectly in such a way that overcoming the flaws would require rewriting too much of the Joomla core code, is that it has no concept of comment spam control. That alone is a big issue for any Internet content site; with an intranet, where the audience is pre-qualified and controlled, comment spam is not an issue. Clearly, Joomla would do well in such an environment, but not out here in the big world.
None of the third-party add-ons to Joomla handle comment spam control either. I worked for several weeks with the maker of one of the more popular comment add-ons to try to build a decent, user-friendly means of comment spam control, but ultimately it failed because, as the programmer and I both came to realize, Joomla simply didn’t have the core functionality to allow anything more sophisticated than an easily defeated captcha (that’s the image of numbers and letters one must successfully copy into a form field).
Comment spam is a critical component missing from Joomla, but it isn’t the only one missing. But I don’t want to write a second article about Joomla here in the comments. :-)
Suffice it to say, I know Joomla, I’ve worked with and within Joomla more deeply than most, and I still stand by everything I wrote above back in April.
DESIGNORATI
StickyMind,
I should have responded sooner, but I was up to my elbows in Joomla. :-)
I agree, but that 1% gives hope to the entire open source software movement. Look at WordPress as a shining example of open source done right (mostly, politics are starting to creep into even that project). WordPress has a voluminous codex and an extremely active support forum where I would estimate 75-85% of questions are answered correctly.
OpenOffice is another good example.
I hear (have not verified) that Drupal, a Joomla competitor, is also much better documented and supported.
Don’t let the Joomlas and Mambos of the world make you cynical. There are yet a few gems in the dung heap.
DESIGNORATI
One interesting point is that the Joomla documentation is almost exactly, word for word, the same as the mambo documentation. the only word different (that I can find) is Joomla instead of Mambo.
As someone who likes to learn things fast and hates tools with poor documentation I am peeved at the lack of consideration and customer focus that the state of documentation illustrates. It amounts to navel gazing of the highest order.
If Microsoft released software with as poor and incomplete a level of documentation as Joomla and (to a slightly lesser extent) Mambo there would be almighty hell to pay.
Word to the programmers in Joomla - when a Project manager asks for the user manual that is NOT paperwork - that is customer focus. Documentation is NOT optional - it is essential or else people with vote with their feet.
Why does my employer use Sharepoint instead of Joomla for internal CMS stuff… because Sharepoint came with a manual the size of a phone book and online help running to the thousands of pages. THAT’s what we pay the licence fee for.
For the record- I’m a Senior Information Architecture Project Manager and any vendor producing documentation to the standard of Joomla would be escorted off the premises and asked never to pitch for business again… it just isn’t professional.
I have to agree with much of the article. I am a Drupal refugee—a friend was singing the praises of Joomla to me, so I started building my new site in it. He promised easier building of templates, much more css control (something I am admittedly behind the times in).
But I hit a glitch with a mambot … the supposedly 5-star “All Videos” bot … if I added more than two videos, the section/page layout was destroyed. So I posted on joomla.org for help … no response for a couple days. So I have just removed one of the videos, leaving two for now, instead of the eight I want on that page. My plight was viewed 20 times, but no one has answered as of yet. I have spent an hour or two trying to find some clues online as to what I am doing wrong.
I can assure you the Drupal community has MUCH better support within the community.
I have 3 projects happening right now … in the next week or so, but if I can’t figure out how to do things with Joomla, I will stick with Drupal for these, and continue screwing around with Joomla on my own new site.
For the record, I am an artist/web guy … Dreamweaver, Flash, Photoshop, etc. … are my stock in trade mostly. I am the target market.
And I am frustrated with Joomla at the moment.
Instead of slamming the author, I think the Joomla! community would be wise to consider the criticisms as set forth in the article on documentation, as well as those in the comments.
As Jack Lemmon said in Glengarry Glen Ross about closing a sale to some rubes,”All them … no me.”
A very misinformed article.
I guess no one has told the author, that Mambo is more proprietary than Joomla, which broke away from Mambo and forked the code, because Mambo was becoming more proprietary, although Mambo isn’t proprietary by the strict definiton of the word.
Additionally there is an extension for Dreamweaver 8 that allows the designer to create their own custom templates.
A very misinformed article.
I guess no one has told the author, that Mambo is more proprietary than Joomla, which broke away from Mambo and forked the code, because Mambo was becoming more proprietary, although Mambo isn’t proprietary by the strict definiton of the word.
Additionally there is an extension for Dreamweaver 8 that allows the designer to create their own custom templates.
In regards to lack of documentation — Folks you aren’t paying $$ for the privildege of using open source. If you need documentation, I suggest you buy a commercial solution, or purchase a service agreement with Mambo — One of the reasons that the splinter happened, is because the Mambo foundation offers commercial services, one of which is support.
“The people we are waiting for are us”.
Maybe you can put your hand up and help/lead the Joomla documentation project.