Ask HN: Any advice on Joomla? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Any advice on Joomla?

I have a small project in the napkin stage and it seems like I could do it on Joomla with ease. Scalability is not an issue. Has anyone got any practical experience with it?

View on HN

Can't help directly, but I'd love to see a discussion, as it's been on my back-burner radar for a while.

Seems an active community: "Last stable release": 2009.06.30 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joomla)

Also in wikiped: a fork from Mambo:

"Joomla! is a free open source content management system for publishing content on the World Wide Web and intranets as well as a Model–view–controller (MVC) Web Application Development framework. The system includes features such as page caching to improve performance, RSS feeds, printable versions of pages, news flashes, blogs, polls, website searching, and language internationalization. Joomla is licensed under the GPL, and is the result of a fork of Mambo.

"It is written in the PHP programming language and uses the MySQL database system to store information."

In my experience, I built a site a few years ago with Joomla and it worked well for a simple community site, but seemed difficult to modify or expand. I personally recommend Drupal as a base CMS, it has a sharp learning curve but it is infinitely extensible and powerful.

How big is simple? 100? 1000? I'll go look at Drupal. Thanks.

If it is just a community site I mean, then Joomla is probably okay. But if you plan to add some sort of application on top, like an index of movies, or characters in a game, or businesses in the area, etc. Anything beyond blog, forum, etc.

I'm running a Joomla! site on top of a Wordpress installation and, while I like Joomla!, I almost wish I'd stuck purely with Wordpress. At issue is whether you need a full-featured CMS with all the bells and whistles (and associated complexity). Some things to consider are how frequently you'll be updating the site, whether their will be multiple contributors and whether you'll need a variety of modes to present content. As trickjarrett notes above, it's difficult to expand, though the flexibility in creating themes and being able to modify the behaviors of existing components by cloning them and changing them is pretty powerful. Wordpress, on the other hand, can be mangled into just about anything you want since there is a massive library of third-party add-ons and, to me, it's a little more pluggable.

On top of Wordpress? That's confusing.

I have a Wordpress that I have been using for my business and it just seems stodgy compared with Joomla. Wordpress seems to be stuck at blog, where as Joomla seems to be much more flexible.

That said, I am still experimenting and this new project needs to support multiple users in a controllable way.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com