I recently was contracted to do a web site for a nurse midwife, who up till now has been using two-page site piggybacked on a friend’s server. It is the most basic of basic sites, and while it has pertinent contact information it has a circa-1996 flavor to it. What she wants is a site on which she may post a bi-monthly newsletter, keep an open guest book of testimonials, and maintain some static pages with updated info from the old site.
Content management is the key for her, and so I decided to try Joomla! 1.5 for this purpose. The 1.0.x branch is starting to look last-gen, so I thought it best to move up a notch.
After spending several days working on a layout for my Joomla! site theme, I have just begun the process of getting content situated. Let me just start by saying:
JOOMLA IS MASSIVE. I mean, really extensive. For a guy that has done probably 95% custom PHP-based applications, dealing with the sheer breadth of Joomla is overwhelming at first. It is a completely different side of web “development”, leaving almost all site creation to the designer and the content manager. If you want to develop for Joomla, you develop extensions, or build custom functionality into your site.
That is if it doesn’t already exist.
Joomla users have 100′s of plug-ins at their disposal, leaving virtually all the guesswork out of this software.
However, I miss a text editor and the fact that I knew every square inch of my markup. In my first static page creation I still chose the “Edit HTML” option and ironed out the whitespace and made sure everything looked kosher. TinyMCE (the default editor for Joomla!) just leaves too much unknown.
Anyway, I’ll post some screenshots of this work in progress once I have a home page created.
