I had some previous experience installing and setting up websites based on WordPress and Drupal using MAMP (which if you want to get some practice working with CMS sites I highly recommend doing this).
First and foremost I did not really like my experience with using Joomla. Unfortunately after setting up my Joomla account I had a hard drive failure that I have spent the better part of 72 hours attempting to recover from (as of writing this I am still having issues with recovering my backed up files onto a clean install of the Operating System), so I am probably always going to associate the frustrations I have been having with my laptop with my Joomla experience.
The first issue that I had with Joomla came when I made the mistake of deleting the the initial Article site. Relating the term article to a blog or magazine post I did not associate the initial article with being essentially the index.html file. This forced me to completely reset the site, but no big deal since I had not added content yet right? As soon as I was set up again I decided to try to install a third party template like I would with WordPress or Drupal, but somehow this did not only erase my website, but it somehow magically erased my administrative site as well, website reset number 2. On my third go I decided to play it safe(r) and followed the instructions for setting up a Joomla site using this guide:
While this guide was helpful I noticed right away that the version of Joomla that the person in the video was using was different than the version of Joomla that the demo version offered (version 3.3). This was not really a big deal until getting to the part about adding the scrolling photos to the main page, as you can see by the lack of scrolling photos on my live site, I could never quite figure it out. At first they were completely warped in appearance, then after a few tweaks they just disappeared entirely and I could never get them to come back.
Overall I think that Joomla is a fairly straightforward interface, but in general I have had a better experience with Drupal and Wordpress (or even Tumblr for that matter). I believe that given more time I could develop a fully functioning website using this platform, but given the short amount of time that Maymester allows I feel like I open a can of frustrating worms and am not sure that I would really recommend Joomla to someone just starting out (or dealing with a crashed hard drive during a school project at least!).
Hey, Patrick!
ReplyDeleteYou make a good point that Joomla would probably be easier to use if we had a lot of time to work with it. There's a learning curve when you're just starting out with any new technology, but I still think that developers could make their programs more intuitive and easy to use. After all, who wants to spend a lot of time learning how to use one CMS when another one can get the same job done much more easily?
Anyway, your site turned out really well. (I especially like your template choice and GIF usage!)
Hope your computer gets well soon!
Ugh! Sorry your experience was so awful Patrick! I think anyone in your boat would equate Joomla with the frustration of a drive failure. Glad you were able to get your site up and running and I hope your computer issues get resolved, I know how frustrating that can be! (lost a 20+ page paper the night before it was due - not a fun all nighter experience).
ReplyDeleteI love the videos on your site!