[ProgSoc] why does joomla suck?

Andrew Halliday mail at andi.id.au
Sun Sep 14 19:06:30 EST 2008


On 9/12/08, David Adam <zanchey at ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 11 Sep 2008, Andrew Halliday wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I don't know that Joomla sucks, I'm just curious as to any bad
> experiences
> > people may have had with this CMS as I'm considering rolling it out for
> an
> > Intranet site for a small organisation.
> >
> > If you've used it, what were the pains and the joys?
> > i.e. what features were lacking (even through extensions) and what did
> you
> > really like about it?
>
>
> I got your message through a ProgSoc lurker, and all I can say is that
> Joomla! 1.0 presents a lovely interface if you're just getting started but
> has a stack of rough edges. 1.5 might be better, but I don't know of
> anyone using it yet. I spent a lot of time working with wamss.org.au and
> ndlss.org.au, among other things.
>
> The admin interface is quite impressive when you first fire it up, but
> very slow and clunky to get things done in - if you close a window
> without first saving or discarding your changes to an item, for example,
> everyone else is locked out of editing that item. The templating stuff is
> pretty reasonable for changing look, if not feel.
>
> Joomla! allows you to use a write-review-publish workflow. Unfortunately,
> you are basically required to use this workflow: there is no easy way to
> create groups other than the builtin author/editor/reviewer/administrator
> groups, and assigning permissions to use certain extensions has to be done
> by editing undocumented text files.
>
> Security is a big problem. Not only are you running on the world's most
> insecure programming language, but the Joomla! core has had a number of
> security revisions - often with quite big problems. There also seems to be
> a never-ending stream of security issues with extensions, and there's no
> security mailing list or auto-update mechanism that I've discovered.
> Additionally, from an administration point of view, anyone who has
> administrator access to Joomla! can own your hosting account.
>
> If you need a PHP/MySQL-style solution, I've seen a lot of good Drupal
> sites, and it's apparently pretty good from an administration point of
> view Fundamentally, though, I think a wiki is the way to go these days -
> tools like MoinMoin allow complex ACLs to control who can edit what, etc.
>
>
> David Adam
> UWA University Computer Club
> zanchey at ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au



Thanks David, Peter and Tom for your feedback. I've decided to go with a
wiki for the site and a seperate forum and image gallery package (yet to be
determined) which will be hacked together for single sign-on. Joomla sounds
good (and I've now played for a while with several demo's, but it's the last
10% that leaves me wanting).


Cheers,
Andi
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