adminlog

alpha02 is simply an installation of the much vaunted thing – Joomla.  And I stopped right there because this is not for us.  For a myriad of reasons.

Firstly this is a top-down approach whereas my approach to web building is bottom-up adding the best of scripts, writing a bit and adding modules as they are needed.  Joomla wants to be the front end of your site and also the framework – you install it without anything else in your space.

Okay it is easy and quick.  And that is good for others to come along and help or take over.

Joomla is a popular manifestation of – buzzphrase – a content management system.  A CMS.  But what is that exactly.  A filing cabinet?   A bunch of shelves with a card index?   Yes.  But we’ve got that with MySql – the databases.  I’m clueless as to how this adds anything at all.

So what have we got with alpha02?   A lot of spaces for news items – that’s a newspaper.  There’s a blog and users can sign in – although why would they want to?

There are loads of plug-ins for Joomla, but you are probably in the hands of joomlese folk when it comes to the still cutting edge technology of media streaming.   And as joomlese people obviously like off-the-shelf solutions they may not be the most radically inventive.  Like the Ruby on Rails folk.

Bottom line is how it works.  On the server – Joomla feels kludgy and sluggish.  It is sizeable and has for us unnecessary features.  So no.

Incidentally Journalness has the identical installation screens so I guess it is a clone of an early build of a Joomla which would have been its predecessor (and now its competitor) Mambo.

Nonetheless an interesting exercise.  Not least because it points to a system which might be useful to us – Drupal.   Drupal is more technically configurable than Joomla – it has much better support for community websites and it is reported to play nicely with other applications.   So Drupal is happy to be one component among many.  It is often used with WordPress as the blogging application.