of Lars J. Nilsson

This is a series of post starting here, in which I look at different CMS installations and despair.Joomla! is the offshoot of Mambo. I’ve heard a lot of good from both. So I actually started looking at, and installing, Mambo.  But after surfing round for an hour or so, looking for documentation on multilingual content (mambelfish? god preserve me) and installing Mambo and playing around a bit, I found this: Joom!Fish. This is the Joomla version of the Mambelfish and lo! They distribute a package with Joomla pre-bundled with Joom!Fish. That was enough to tip me over the edge and install Joomla instead.The Good

• Very good installation routine. Easy does it. Should be installable anywhere.
• Tons of extension and themes.
• Integrated search engine: we like!

The Semi-Good

• An attractive admin interface, but… Oh, so cluttered. They’ve done their best to clean it up but the navigation isn’t 100% and now and then leaves you waiving your hand for help, not knowing where to go for a particular task.
• Multilingual content. The upside of it is that… it is there and works. And you can translate anything in the entire system. But the process stinks and the inline editing is confusing. When you create a page, you create a “default” page which you can then translate to different languages and this is the page he inline editing works on. You would have thought that, had you selected Swedish, and been looking at the Swedish translation of the pages, the inline editing would have edited… The swedish page! But no, it doesn’t. So inline editing is off. It also makes me wonder, what is this “default” language they seem o think I’m using? Esperanto?
• User group system. Not very well documented nor very flexible.

The Bad

• Cluttered PHP and cluttered GUI makes for confusion. Took me hours to understand and set up a small test site in two languages.
• Translation doesn’t always mean that the different languages will have the same page/site layout. For example, the festival I will implement the system for usually have extra pages for foreign visitors about ticket ordering, traveling etc. This seems only semi-supported (read: undocumented and bad).
• Editing multilingual pages is just to hard.  The pages themselves are ok but the rest! Menu items and what not. I can see support issues coming my why should we go with this.

ConclusionThe installation, the extensions and the themes saves Joomla!. It is not a bad package, and for a single language site I would probably use it. As it is, it is still not out of the running, I’ll keep it installed if nothing else and better comes along.

Båstad Chamber Music Festival wants a new web site. And who can blame them? But naturally it should be a CMS of some sort. Thus the task for the weekend was: Find a decent CMS to use. This turned out to be cumbersome and boring.These were my requirements when I started:

• Ease of use. The editors of the site should not have to be more than normal computer users to edit the site. Without any education. A WYSIWYG editor is implicit here folks.
• Simple to administer. I don’t need a lot o features, I need something which is simple and flexible and clean.
• Multilingual content. It must support multiple content languages, and still be easy to use.
• It must be possible to install on any decent web host without root access as I don’t know  as yet how the hosting will be provided. With decent I mean: MySQL and possibly Java on a reliable web host.

I would also like, but do not require:

• Java. As I’m no fan of PHP (aving worked to little with it) I’d prefer Java.
• A lot of extensions and themes. Although I don’t particularly need the extensions for this client and will probably end up doing a new theme, the choices would be nice to have.

I absolutely don’t want:

• Cluttered PHP.
• Cluttered installations or cluttered admin interfaces A cluttered interface, be it disc or gui or api points to a cluttered mind.

Check the next post for our first contendant, Joomla!