Hi,

Looking for a bit of advice. Thinking of switching/updating our company website to the Joomla software/system. Anyone have any input...recommend it , not a good idea or what? The idea is that a non-dreamweaver expert could also make updates and access for changes.

Thanks.

Joomla is pretty reliable with lots of extensions and developer all around, it all depends on your requirements in the first place.

I would highly suggest that someone with solid PHP / MySql background if you're thinking of MVC development or even pre-developed extensions, it's never perfect and you will always need this little extra touch to secure it and adopt it to your needs.

I'm not sure what are you after, so maybe if you post more information or even a website link, it would be helpful to say if Joomla is the best for you.

You'll need a learning time to understand its concepts.
Then it's usually the source of hackers, so you'll have to regularly update it.

Beside that it's good but it's better that someone with time and knowledge take care of it.
They should quite a few things to take care of such as backing up the database, etc...

Hi Mowvich,

Well, it's basically an informational site with the usual company history, reference, contact pages as well as some samples (images & audio) of work.

I'm not the one who works on creation, just the one doing the research into new options. From what I understand, the current site was created with an older version of Dreamweaver, one of the guys is recommending going to Typo3 and I heard recently about Joomla as an alternative open source system.

Really at the start of the research, but sounds like it still requires a bit of knowledge.

Thanks for the input.

For me Typo3 is just useless and i would totally suggest it's not the best option if you require easy administration, editing, good visuals and better UX, unless you want to end up with rows and columns type of site with lots of text and no visual effects nor enhanced UX.

That was also my impression of Typo3...and why I got into the search for an alternative.

Another vote against TYPO3 - total overkill and anyone hoping to use it will need a 6 month learning curve.

Joomla is great, but needs the software continually updated as it's a hackers' favourite. You may be able to install Joomla instantly on your hosting and update it with the click of a button...

Hi guys,

as a personal advice, I will say the following:

if its the first time that you are going to use a CMS system, go for Joomla, since it takes really less time to learn it.

TYPO3 is powerful but it is hard to learn if you are not familiar with php/html/css & co...

I have done much joomla sites for my customers and they all are able to menage their website content without any problem

Best regards.

for a basic content site with few changes or dynamic content, just make a simple static webiste. fast, easy, no hackers.

if you want to go along the cms route, drupal is another alternative (as is wordpress). for for any of these, when (not if) you get hacked, you'll wonder if it would have been better. cheaper and less time consuming to make a simple static page.

WordPress is such a fantastic easy to use piece of software, going way beyond what it was originally designed for - blogging. I've experience with joomla but personally, if would look to see if wordpress can achieve what you want and go with it as it is much more user friendly and has a smaller learning curve.

I think that Joomla, Drupal, WordPress & co... all are cool cms systems, it only depends what the website owner wants to do...

If you want to have a complete panorama of the Open Source go here and choose the one you prefer, there are tons of demos available

http://php.opensourcecms.com/

I honestly tried it once but the "logic" was too complex and it wasn't easy to train people on how to use it.

You probably will be better off with Wordpress and a very good programmer to customize it.

It's a lot easier to run, update, and have people work on it.

I am assuming on this that you will have a staff inserting content, etc.

If you instead will run it yourself and like Joomla then go for it!

Hi,

Have you tried this website?

http://php.opensourcecms.com/

This has demo pre-installs of the major PHP CMS and Blogging engines - so can have a play and read reviews.

I used Typo3 for one website - the whole thing with Typoscript was a bloody nightmare to learn. Also, the Rich Text Editor was a pain for the end users. that was in 2005 and maybe things have improved since then.

I have had good experiences with Wordpress - which, while it is a essentially a blogging tool actually has enough features and plugins to let you develop some fairly good websites which are easy to update. Plus there are a lot of ready-made page templates (or "themes") that you can download and customise.

With any of these CMS, as stated before they are magnets for hackers and I have had one site irrepairably vandalised - so you need to make sure you backup data and keep up with the security patches - as I found to my cost!

Cheers,
Nick

Going on what you have posted here as your needs. I would recommend thoroughly Rapidweaver, even though I know it is Mac-only environment. The resulting websites it creates, work on all platforms that I have tested, Mac, Linux and Windows. I investigated Typo3 for a while but came to the conclusion that it needed far more time to learn that I would ever have patience for.

I have been webmaster for 6 companies, the last one using Typo3, currently Joomla. We have a complex site with 4 language versions and about 5000 links.

The biggest drawback with Joomla is the complete lack of broken link management. There is none, you must manage it manually, which really sucks.

No problem with hackers/security yet, with over 150K visits per month.

Broken links is well covered in Rapidweaver through a cheap plugin template.

Broken links? Old and quirky, but Xenu still works:

http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

Thanks, I have it but it generates as much garbage as it does useful information.