Hi Joomla! crowd. It's great to have a local forum.

I have a question that was prompted by looking around at people's portfolios.

What circumstances cause you to decide to use or not use Joomla!? We use it in almost every single site we build - it can be like using the SS Enterprise to go to the Moon however even a simple site can benefit from a good CMS.

Do you use (dare I say it) simpler CMS systems like Wordpress or even a custom CMS where you are doing a site for the local hairdresser and you know they will only have about 3-4 articles which may be updated twice a year.

Looking forward to some robust discussion on this.

Cheers,
Sean

Hi Sean

Welcome to the forum and thanks for posting.

Re your Q, for myself I rarely do non-Joomla sites. I can occasionally be tempted to do a bit of Flash or plain HTML. I did a Wordpress one just to find out how it worked (yuk! too little flexibility).

I have heard of these two low-end Opern Source CMSs: cmsmadesimple.org and radiantcms.org, but I've found that on sites that small, if people really want to update their own content, they might as well have Joomla - then I can always add things later if they want them.

Also you know, there's only so much technolgoy I can keep on top of....

Yep - I expect discussion on this will be very interesting. Any takers?

My older sites are in dreamweaver templates. The last two or three of them will be converted to Joomla by the end of the year, especially where they're now asking for extra functionality.

My new sites are now all Joomla, and similarly to dex, other CMS I tried over the 2 years before selecting Mambo/Joomla were not flexible enough, or were too cumbersome to use.

Someone used cmsmadesimple on a site I was involved with at the start of the year, where I think at the end of the day, Joomla would have been a better fit - and had I had the time I would have done it in Joomla from the outset.

I've had a few people now contract me for my joomla skills where they are switching from either a custom cms or another system, and want to have me focus on the conversions of other sites, or when trying to do something unusual in Joomla.

And then for added fun, the project of the week is to integrate Joomla content into either straight HTML, or another CMS or other dynamic language (PHP ASP etc). Tidying up a complex post on Joombers.com to create a tutorial for it (possibly for a future user group topic).

To see the result so far
www.kpsystems.com.au - Joomla install (of all my sites, my own needs the most work)
www.kpsystems.com.au/geocaching - the banner ads at the bottom of the page are served from my Joomla site, and are just tucked into an iframe.

Yep, I have a lot of clients trying to escape from proprietary CMS and other such evils. Recently I had one client abandon my HTML site for a proprietary CMs and now, three months later, they are back knocking on my door to get Joomla.

Hi

In my experience working with community organisations and schools, the question I am asked the most is \"How can we update the site?\" In days gone by, I would have them buy Dreamweaver or use a free WYSIWYG editor to update the site. I have also tried publishing using blogger to clients sites which was successful and allowed them to update a news section and any major changes would be done by me. In finding Joomla the problem has been solved and have begun converting sites.

For me the biggest advantage is for the clients to be able to update their own sites or for me being able to do it from anywhere on any computer.

Look forward to further posts and ideas!

Yep, I certainly agree. Also it allows for the user to accept as much or as little responsibility for the site as they want. They can just stick with entering articles, or they can progress their expertise by learning to manage the site, and even add new functionality. Not something they could have done with an HTML site.

Also, they can communicate with one another via the site, which prompts at least some sense of ownership. The more the merrier, I think....

One of the areas that I have some concern in is giving the user too much control (and thereby the ability to break something). I know you can reduce their permissions level in the system to keep confusion down.

Does anyone actually go the next step and code up a custom admin template?

Hm. I would rather educate them. On occasion I have set up administrators and reduced their access to certain Admin menu items (e.g. components) in includes/gacl.class.php

Mostly people are too scared to mess with what they don't understand, and if they do mess with settings, they can usually be rescued quite easily. I would rather encourage them to get to know their system, then they can be more responsible for it and get better use from it.

With in the realm of basic CMS's and with the multitude of extensions now available for Joomla! there are becoming less and less reasons not to us Joomla!..

But... there are still plenty of cases where it simply doesn't cut the mustard. For example... hacks should always be avoided so at this stage if ACL is an issue then automatically Joomla! should be reconsidered in favour of other systems(although this will change in1.6).

One argument I have seen in the past is that Joomla! is too much for a basic business card site. I generally disagree as it can be scaled back and better to have something that can grow with the site rather than a small solution that gets outgrown and requires a complete redevelopment down the track. This Joomla!day site is a good example... its small now but has the ability to grow exponentially.

Cheers
Shayne

I try as often as possible to use Joomla.

Its easy and robust.

If the application is too complex then I use cakePHP.

It it is flash front end then I use cakePHP, AMFPHP and remoting.

The site is never to simple to not have joomla.

With Joomla 1.5 I think I will even use cake less again because we have MVC in Joomla and some great helpers.

It really is an amazing framework and CMS.

The times I have not used joomla is when you can use a unique script which focuses on 1 topic which does it better.

E.g

If you wanted a professional auction bidding site, joomla does not provide much for this, I would go with phpprobid, which focuses totally on an auction script.

Also if you wanted a professional community site with a ton of features like myspace, I would go with boonex dolphin, which is at the top of its game lately.

joomla is great, but sometimes for niche business functions it is better to go with another developed script which has been around for a few years, and only has 1 use.