Joomla!

Thanks for having that Joomla message on your site, Gman. You've led me to a wonderful thing :)

Who here has had experience with Joomla?

I got it running on my (now wonderfully organized and wisely designed; this time passwords are NOT readable in the anonymous FTP home) local testing server.

It seems wonderfully featureful, and it has all sorts of things that I could never hope to achieve with the sad web site system I developed.
(RSS, site-wide user accounts, a Search tool... all with a MySQL database instead of writing files).

What I'm wondering is how easy is it to mess around with?
What kind of work am I looking to do if I want to fit it into my own layout?
Is it possible to integrate Joomla with some sort of forum system?

This isn't really the right place to post (Since there is Joomla.org), but I'm having trouble finding their forums :S


Edit:
Oooh, their documentation is making sense!

And... er... I found their forum.

I have 2 sites, see this one...

www.liant.us/joomla

To answer your questions and firstly PORT IN THE JOOMLA FORUMS...

It's easy to 'mess around with'

If you want to change the layout then you need to know CSS

Use SMF for the forums.

Joomla is pretty good, but I had to fight it to do just about anything. I guess that's the nature of a highly automated app like that. For example, to have a gallery are and thumbnailed images in posts, I had to install modules. These seem like pretty basic features.

But thats the point - it alows modules therefore is very flexible!

Joomla is very bloated. Drupal is king imho.

well i'm not getting into a debate oer which is better. I use Joomla, it does everything I need and more and is being developed consantly.

There are other CMSs, use the best one that fits your needs.

Yeah, but only if someone has written a module to do what they want. You could extend the analogy to giving someone a PC and saying "it's very programmable, you can make it do anything - if the software exists, of course".

I went through three different Gallery modules until I found one that did close to what I wanted. I found another pretty early on, but the download link was dead. In short, I spent much more time hunting for bits and pieces than anything else.

Use another CMS that does EXACTLY what you want then.

I didn't ask for your advice, I was just answering the OP with my experiences...

I wasn't giving you advice just my experiences...
Oh and ner-ner-ner-ner-ner.

krange frotty beta is worth a peek...it's a bit like Skraal but doesn't crash as often.

Checking out Drupal.

I'm also going to try doing Joomla from an empty site. It's a bit overwhelming when it already has all that example content. Probably will feel less so if I have to start from scratch.

I do like how its design is nearly identical to what I came up with. Very reassuring :)
My base page is sort of like a Joomla template, where to add content to each section you just do
$pagelist=SortPages('somesection')
ForEach($pagelist as $page){
$page->output(somesettingsifyouwant)
}

Knowing that that design is not actually garbage (and very easy, to boot), I may have to take the time to release it...

Yeah, but...



... is advice. So you totally were.


*sticks out tongue*

:-)