I am preparing a new web­site using Joomla. Why? To learn some­thing new. I cre­ated my Haunts page to learn Google Maps. I cre­ated this blog to learn some­thing about Word­Press. My new site, which is still being written, could tech­ni­cally have been devel­oped using Word­Press as well. Word­Press is a great product that has matured well and has a great user inter­face and lots of devel­oper sup­port. Joomla is rel­a­tively young and – as I’ve dis­cov­ered – some­what lacking in fea­tures. The list of avail­able exten­sions seems lim­ited in com­par­ison with what is avail­able for some­thing like Drupal. And, of course, Drupal has a much larger core fea­ture set.

As time goes on, better exten­sions are being written for Joomla. A good example is JCom­ments, an exten­sion which was recently added to the cat­alog on the Joomla web­site. I had pre­vi­ously installed !Joom­la­Com­ment for my site, which at the time was the best of the options I had reviewed. How­ever, I was dis­ap­pointed by the tem­plates pro­vided for the for­mat­ting of com­ments, which are all depen­dent on ancient HTML table lay­outs. By com­par­ison, JCom­ments uses stan­dards com­pliant HTML for­mat­ting, AJAX actions, and a nice simple theme. Because of the HTML com­pliant for­mat­ting, it should be very easy to apply my own CSS styling and make the com­ments match with my site design.

Hope­fully, the mat­u­ra­tion process of Joomla will ulti­mately be reflected in its doc­u­men­ta­tion. Most of the doc­u­men­ta­tion appears to be very tech­nical. It’s for PHP pro­gram­mers. At least they have some­thing to work with. For those of us who are con­tent man­agers, or who are working to design and theme a Joomla site, There isn’t a lot to go on. This was also my com­plaint about Drupal, although Drupal has been around long enough (now in ver­sion 6) so that a Google search of a Drupal ques­tion will usu­ally yield an answer. There are also Drupal books that can help designers to learn the ropes. I haven’t done a search for books yet, but there’s much less online dis­cus­sion about Joomla, resulting in fewer suc­cessful searches for answers to theme-related questions.

To date, my Joomla expe­ri­ence has been pos­i­tive. I would not rec­om­mend it for every web­site, but does work for the simple web­site that I am building. As I said before, my site could be accom­plished using Word­Press, but I can see where Joomla helps. I also like the sim­plicity of the Joomla back-end, which is refreshing com­pared to the mess that is the Drupal inter­face. As my expe­ri­ence con­tinues, per­haps I will come to under­stand and appre­ciate more of what Joomla can offer.