Programmer’s Critique of Joomla
Ten reasons Joomla!/Mambo is an outdated CMS
[From: "RipperDoc’s Clinic, Dissecting just about everything, live from Hong Kong, China"]
"Having recently been working intensely with Joomla!, and in the same time with Wordpress and some AJAX-development I have come to the following conclusion: Joomla!/Mambo is outdated. It has moved from being cool and hot to being mainstream, boring and just old…here is my list of reasons that it’s outdated…”
“The layout is based on tables.”
[Shouldn't the parts of a Content Management System be distributed as follows: content [database], presentation [template file], and control flow [program file]?]
“It is also very cluttered and when making a template, you have very little control on how system outputted data should be displayed.”
[The template tags in Movable Type and Wordpress REALLY DO separate the data and presentation layer]
The templates and style sheets tend to be large and cluttered, with heaps of different, class names, often confusingly named.
[Again template tags]
“The administrative interface is slow and not very user friendly.”
[Modules seemed easy to handle. components couldn’t figure out]
“You can still not sort tables after columns, even though they look sortable. You often get stuck by pressing back and getting the message “Do you want to resend the POSTDATA?”.
“Some simple AJAX and usability thinking would make the interface much better. “
[Usability for sure, but not really sure how making it asynchronous would make it simpler]
There is a plethora of templates and plugins, but it’s very hard to find good ones. Many plugins are badly developed, very specialized or cost money. When searching for templates you get hundreds of sites selling templates but not looking very trustworthy.
[One plug and play module with functionality (poll, login, quiz...) that you can put in any CMS block (left, top, right, center) that can be used in any CMS, Joomla, PostNuke, Wordpress…]
“Of course, the fork has caused greats problem. Plugins are being shifted from Mambo to Joomla, some deprecated, and the confusion is considerable.”
[It confuses me, but its free, how can I complain?]
“This is very different from the Wordpress community, where most plugins are of high quality, and where you quite easily can find the plugins thanks to the blogging community.”
[Wordpress looks like it has everything and the registration is in one non-OO file, I’m going to try this]
“The code base is huge and the API is complicated and often inconsequent. Just getting the right information as a developer is a challenge. To add to this, the balance between backwards compability and refactoring is a constant issue, and it seems Mambo is always somewhere in between, in the bad sense.”
[Getting right information, that’s it. Wasted a lot of time. Just going to use a debugger.]
“The whole CMS package is big and bulky, and so is the system itself. It’s often slow, either in loading or in finishing administrative tasks, due to many page loads until completion of a task.”
[Is Wordpress or any PHP system really any faster?]
“The category system is inconseqent, having sections, with categories, but no more sub levels. Add to this components with their own separate systems. This needs a real cleanup. The same problems occur in the user management system, with a rigid hiearchy of ACL that is buggy and not used everywhere… Where is the social collaboration in Mambo… “
[Make the content taggable with multiple key words, so it can role up into different semantic hierarchies]
"Development is very slow. It takes months and months to make just a slight update, which mostly consists of bug fixes. The whole mess around the forking of the code into Joomla! also made a halt in the progress. My guess is that the code base is cluttered and makes it hard for developers to quickly add features, especially when having to consider backwards compability."
"I admit, I have compared with Wordpress in many of these issues. And Wordpress is a clear role model, but it is a blog system, not a full-fledged CMS. Even though Wordpress can be a CMS, with some plugins, it’s not optimal. Where are all the modern and original CMS:es? There must be a huge user base that’s craving something new, light-weight, easily integrated and extendable?"
[Seems like Wordpress. I’ll give it a try. Don’t mean to be negative, but need something simple to understand]
[From: "RipperDoc’s Clinic, Dissecting just about everything, live from Hong Kong, China"]
"Having recently been working intensely with Joomla!, and in the same time with Wordpress and some AJAX-development I have come to the following conclusion: Joomla!/Mambo is outdated. It has moved from being cool and hot to being mainstream, boring and just old…here is my list of reasons that it’s outdated…”
“The layout is based on tables.”
[Shouldn't the parts of a Content Management System be distributed as follows: content [database], presentation [template file], and control flow [program file]?]
“It is also very cluttered and when making a template, you have very little control on how system outputted data should be displayed.”
[The template tags in Movable Type and Wordpress REALLY DO separate the data and presentation layer]
The templates and style sheets tend to be large and cluttered, with heaps of different, class names, often confusingly named.
[Again template tags]
“The administrative interface is slow and not very user friendly.”
[Modules seemed easy to handle. components couldn’t figure out]
“You can still not sort tables after columns, even though they look sortable. You often get stuck by pressing back and getting the message “Do you want to resend the POSTDATA?”.
“Some simple AJAX and usability thinking would make the interface much better. “
[Usability for sure, but not really sure how making it asynchronous would make it simpler]
There is a plethora of templates and plugins, but it’s very hard to find good ones. Many plugins are badly developed, very specialized or cost money. When searching for templates you get hundreds of sites selling templates but not looking very trustworthy.
[One plug and play module with functionality (poll, login, quiz...) that you can put in any CMS block (left, top, right, center) that can be used in any CMS, Joomla, PostNuke, Wordpress…]
“Of course, the fork has caused greats problem. Plugins are being shifted from Mambo to Joomla, some deprecated, and the confusion is considerable.”
[It confuses me, but its free, how can I complain?]
“This is very different from the Wordpress community, where most plugins are of high quality, and where you quite easily can find the plugins thanks to the blogging community.”
[Wordpress looks like it has everything and the registration is in one non-OO file, I’m going to try this]
“The code base is huge and the API is complicated and often inconsequent. Just getting the right information as a developer is a challenge. To add to this, the balance between backwards compability and refactoring is a constant issue, and it seems Mambo is always somewhere in between, in the bad sense.”
[Getting right information, that’s it. Wasted a lot of time. Just going to use a debugger.]
“The whole CMS package is big and bulky, and so is the system itself. It’s often slow, either in loading or in finishing administrative tasks, due to many page loads until completion of a task.”
[Is Wordpress or any PHP system really any faster?]
“The category system is inconseqent, having sections, with categories, but no more sub levels. Add to this components with their own separate systems. This needs a real cleanup. The same problems occur in the user management system, with a rigid hiearchy of ACL that is buggy and not used everywhere… Where is the social collaboration in Mambo… “
[Make the content taggable with multiple key words, so it can role up into different semantic hierarchies]
"Development is very slow. It takes months and months to make just a slight update, which mostly consists of bug fixes. The whole mess around the forking of the code into Joomla! also made a halt in the progress. My guess is that the code base is cluttered and makes it hard for developers to quickly add features, especially when having to consider backwards compability."
"I admit, I have compared with Wordpress in many of these issues. And Wordpress is a clear role model, but it is a blog system, not a full-fledged CMS. Even though Wordpress can be a CMS, with some plugins, it’s not optimal. Where are all the modern and original CMS:es? There must be a huge user base that’s craving something new, light-weight, easily integrated and extendable?"
[Seems like Wordpress. I’ll give it a try. Don’t mean to be negative, but need something simple to understand]
posted by Jon Fernquest at 3:50 AM
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