Joomla vs the way I have always developed_问答_开发者

Im discussed in one 开发者_高级运维of my earlier questions, im making a wedding website with a rsvp feature for my brother.

It was suggested to me that I should use Joomla CMS.

However, I planned on hand coding the site from scratch until finish and have never used a CMS such as Joomla.

Forgive me, but: 1) Whats the point of using Joomla CMS 2) What advantages will it give me for such a project (small wedding website with RSVP feature) 3) Should I use Joomla or just do what I normally do and totally hand code the project as I always have done.

I am interested in this, because I am always looking to broaden my horizons.

The answer is: it depends.

There is no point in spending hours learning to use a non-trivial CMS like Joomla for a small project. I recall myself doing this and it was quite a struggle until the first site was exactly how I and the customer planned it.

But if you are past this initial effort it will pay off. As I know the system I can create websites a lot faster than previously. So if you think that you will create some more websites in the coming months and years: learn CMS. A small project is a perfect start.

One of the biggest advantage of a CMS, especially for Joomla, is the heap of plugins that can add all sorts of functionality to your website. In most cases they are quickly installed and configured.

My advice: go for it!

My personal preference is to always develop from scratch, as CMSes in general are way too bulky for my taste. Of course it really depends on the scale of the project. Small websites that don't rely on complex features might benefit from a CMS. They can benefit from a simple blog system as well though ...

I've developed a few sites with Joomla way way back and I can't say that I was too impressed by it.

Recently I got to help a collegue with a CMS called modX (http://modx.com/) which was interesting to work with. Although it's learning curve was a bit slow, due to the peculiar structure it adopts. As far as I can remember things weren't too different for Joomla.

I need to make the same kind of site soon, and was thinking to use wordpress or something like that.

Cheers, Georgi

I like using Joomla, because it allows me to maintain my preferred workflow: Screendesign in Photoshop -> Static HTML/CSS -> Joomla Template. IMHO creating Templates for Joomla is the easier than most other CMS i know (Typo, WP, ModX) as you simply have to replace parts of the static version with joomla tags (menu, content etc.) It still needs some time to get used to the system, but its not that hard.

Just like any other CMS Joomla makes editing easier for people who don't know HTML/CSS and offers many extensions for any kind of features like image galleries, commenting, guestbooks, whatever. You could also grab one of the thousands free joomla templates and adapt it to your needs, this might save you some time.

For this one particular project, maybe you could be quicker with handcoding only but you may consider this as a good opportunity to learn joomla, if you could use this knowledge in future. As this is not a commercial project, maybe you'll have more time and less stress to learn something new.

I like joomla! is not a hard system to learn and is very flexible, if you are afraid of not finding an easy way to develop your web page and maintain you can be safe, joomla is a very good already built cms and is not difficult at all to develop you own modules and plugins that you might need for your page, plus you can give them to everyone that is using joomla as well, that is what I think.