we have got a new project related to Matrimony and our management wants to use Joomla for this. I suggested that it can be done well in core php or any framework, but my boss asks why cant we do it in Joomla.
But i oppose it to the point that Joomla is not suited for a site like matrimony.
I think it would be very complex for developing the design and functionality in Joomla, than with a normal php site.
I doubt whether it would be fair to go ahead with Joomla for this purpose.
Can anyone tell me what i needed to do this in Joomla, if it is a feasible solution.
I especially want to know how to do the design of inner pages with joomla.
Joomla in its core has good template and CMS functionality. If your site is all about publishing content and requires good template then you can chose joomla as your choice. Learning i guess would not be tough.
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This question is a little subjective, however, it aims to give me a bit of information about whether it is better to build or buy.
My company is looking to enter the world of CMSs for our clients websites, do we provide an open source one, or do we build our own model from scratch?
If you buy, which do you use?
If you build, how does your architecture differ?
EDIT: The CMS we are looking to use isn't to maintain our own website, it is something we can offer our clients and pinned onto websites we are custom building for them, it needs to be something that we adapt and manipulate easily for many different website designs and purposes.
How about using opensource one? :-)
Today the only reasons to develop new CMS are:
1) non-usual requirements (deadly rare)
2) You just like to code "your own CMS" (c)
If none is the case, take opensource one.
Personally, I have my own CMS for all my private & commercial purposes, but this was mostly just for programming fun. If you need to deliver, you have to use existing products.
The company I work for wrestled with this same question recently. This depends a lot on your client's expertise and needs. It's generally not advisable to build your own CMS unless you're using it to offer something very novel.
Drupal has lots of plugins available giving a great deal of customizability. It's handy in the same way that most CMSs are in that you can use PHP files as your templates and code them outside of the CMS.
Wordpress has the best user interface of all the CMS's I've used (Drupal, EE, Wordpress, Joomla). If you need to program plugins it's also very well documented and (when the plugin is finished) provides a drag-and-drop interface for the client to make changes to their own web site easily.
I'm currently in the process of moving our site from EE to WP.
Well I can build a simple CMS in less than a day (and everybody can do that with any good web framework). So it depends on how complex it is and how much the open source solutions can do what you want your CMS to do. I generally avoid to use open source CMS because it is usually an overkill compared with my usual client's needs but that's me. Most open source CMS (drupal, joomla, wordpress) have many features that most people simply don't care and they clutter their user interface, so I prefer to build my own as far as it is simple instead of using an open source and struggling to add a new feature and make it scalable.
First, to address your build or "buy" questions - you would be crazy to build. The resourced needed to support code you write as it changes to meet each clients needs will end up costing you a fortune in the long run. It's hard to beat the resources of thousands of developers that many of the big projects have. Does your firm have a security specialist? How about a QA team that constantly searches for ans squashes bugs? Unless you are trying to do a one off, highly specialized application, pick a CMS and go with it.
Next, as far as being able to implement the CMS across many types of sites, that is entirely dependent on your firms developers. If your developer knows XYZ CMS, then he should be able to take any design and make it work for the CMS. Any good CMS has the design layer completely separated from the content and code so the design should not be limited by the CMS in any way. It's just a matter of learning the particular templating system employed by the CMS of your choice.
Last, I am surprised that no one has mentioned the solution to your wanting to limit the amount of control your clients have over their sites. As mentioned you can go the SaaS route and never give the client access to the administrative back end of the site. Any of the good CMS projects offer front end editing. This will allow your client to add/remove/edit the content on the site without giving them access to anything structure or design related. You can completely control the admin, layout, and functionality while the client simply controls the content only, which seems like what you are trying to accomplish.
This depends heavily on what you need, but many CMSs are a platform that you can build upon, getting the best of both worlds.
Wordpress has a very rich plug-in framework.
If you are ok with Windows servers, SharePoint has an extensive plug-in/extension architecture.
I don't think there's any reason to build from scratch unless you are planning to compete in the CMS market.
Do not reinvent the wheel. It takes really a lot of time and money to make a CMS.
If I were you, I would go with an open source CMS, start building custom stuff and contribute back what you can (this is how the company works where I work).
My choice is Drupal, because of the rich set of contribs, excellent flexibility/extensibility and good security.
I think it depends on how many clients are supposed to use the CMS.
We have only one client and built a proprietary CMS which we heavily customize to the client's specific needs.
It also gives us a strategic benefit since this client can hardly migrate his web sites to another company now.
If you have a couple (> 2) of clients who are supposed to use the CMS, IMHO an open source CMS would be the best choice.
Can you develop a new CMS as good as some other ones that have been around for years and hundreds of people have worked on it's development?
That's a question I always ask myself at the start of every website buliding project.
There is surely a good open source platform that meets your requierments and that you can improve.
I suggest these:
Liferay : for large organisations and advanced projects it's written in java. I personally love this CMS. Big places like NASA use it and my company used it for a project, it was great.
Plone : Same as above - language = Python
EZPublish for large organisations but not as advanced as Liferay - language = PHP
Joomla and drupal for normal websites.
As a design agency, presumably with a number of customers with live websites that constantly need to change that are taking manpower away from new projects,
My first question would be if I intend to migrate my existing customers to the CMS based version of their site
Then, What are the commonalities/differences in your customer sites?
If there is a lot of commonality (in the back end code as opposed to the front end design), then maybe integrating a basic article editor is all you need?
Look at how a CMS is going to affect your design flow, Your designs will then be CMS 'Themes', that'll be a learning curve.
I'm not trying to discourage you from Buying or Building a CMS, but the decision will be completely decided by your companies situation.
Personally I use Joomla and DotNetNuke. I'm a developer not a designer, so I buy off the shelf themes and modify them. I also had no existing clients when I started out. I decided to use a CMS specifically because I could buy themes, and secondry to that was the client modifying the articles.
I cant think of an open source CMS that doesn't provide everything that most companies would need.
you get the benefits of bug fixes, little deployment time and ease of documentation.
When selecting the CMS try to use one that is not too bulky or not too popular.
most CMS allow for easy expansion so if a client has special needs then its easy to add functionality.
A reason that you start to build you're CMS could be because the landscape of CMS systems is big (and you can't make up your mind on one system to put in all you're energy).
Do you want a simple CMS for a website, an integrations framework or personalization / social media.
As there are a lot of OS CMS out there, I wouldn't recommend you to start from scratch. Check for research EG:
http://www.slideshare.net/OpenSourceCMS/451-group-future-of-web-content-management-open-source-cms
Also check the OS license of products and how this could affect your projects.
Good luck!
Lots of good responses already, but I don't see anyone talking about the real users, the customer who is paying for this site.
One reason a CMS product is often better is that it can give you a lot of help material, usability refinements and add-ons that you won't get when you build it yourself. More importantly for the end-users, it can mean they extend and add to the site without needing to get IT to give them permission (and the run-around on budget/resources) to do so.
Another issue is that if you build it yourself, then that is the only copy of that software that is being security tested and probed. A product will have been through more penetration tests and probing.
On the other hand there are a wealth of CMS' out there and it can be confusing if you do not know what you want. The CMS Matrix is a good site for comparing all sorts of CMS' to find one that suits your needs.
I work for a CMS vendor, Elcom Technology, so I am slightly biased - but I have also used WordPress, SharePoint, DotNetNuke, Joomla and Drupal to various levels of degree and they all offer a big step up over something home-built.
A very important reason why you may want to choose something that is already made (FOSS or commercial) is that someone else may be able to support it.
PS
I've used CMSMS on various projects. It has enough user control to let them edit, but not mess with the layout and stuff.
what's a good cms for web shops ? I've always used Drupal so far, but I haven't ever developed webshops. I saw there are Magento and a Drupal module Ubecart.
I actually would like to know a "known, easy to use webshop framework so I don't have to take care abuot security issues.. etc
thanks
I have been using both Magento (community edition) and Ubercart depending on client's target hosting preference. I must say that Magento has some impressive functionality and flexible as it has been around for a while. However there are some serious problems with this. Upgrading Magento to the latest version is a complete nightmare and have a good chance of needing to reinstall. Building your themes in Magento is so convoluted, it takes so many inheriting files to create a simple layout change. There is cummunity support, but most of them screaming for help as I remember. Magento model is "make money from support". So I found that they are not so quick to help on the forums.
With Ubercart it is refreshing to see the amount of active help. I think this is important if you are new this. If you are already familiar with Drupal, then I would say stick with Ubercart. It is much simpler to manage than Magento.
They are both good with application security, but you will need to setup your own SSL cert anyway. I've played with some other carts such as Zen and OS Cart, but found them inferior compared to Ubercart and Magento.
There are more than 500 of them. shopping-cart-reviews.com has a search by parameters feature, does a good job.
If I where you, I would compare open source packages like magento and ubercart against hosted ones like our own SolidShops.com.
Check out my blog post about magento (and open source ecommerce packages) versus hosted ones. I've outlined when to go best with open source / hosted depending on your situation.
We've built SolidShops.com specifically for web designers that need an easy and flexible platform for building small to medium sized stores. It's hosted so you won't have to install, update, secure, backup, ... a thing
Design is 100% flexible if you know html and css and it's a breeze to set up.
I'd like to start using a CMS. I've been building static XHTML/CSS pages for awhile, but want to get with the times.
I'm PHP illiterate as of yet, so ease of templating and availability of (free) modules are important factors.
From what I've been reading, SilverStripe or MODx sound like good candidates. What do you think?
Take 1 WordPress a day for 7 days.
Wordpress is a great choice(if not the best) if you want a blog.
For anything else i would suggest Joomla. Its one of the most widely used content management systems out there so there is tons of documentation and people who will gladly assist you. Its open source, which means its free. Easy to use, customise and extend. There are thousands of extensions(plugins) for it.
Templates (the sites skin(design)) are extremly easy to build, almost no skills in php are nessesary.
Take a peak at it at http://joomla.org
There is a great wiki with everything you need to get started at http://docs.joomla.org/
I've been asked to develop a product catalog for our company. We have maybe 20 products, but I'm not sure where to start.
I have some PHP experience and Wordpress CMS experience. I was hoping for an existing framework or solution so I wouldn't have to start from scratch. Anyone have any ideas?
I'm not looking for an ecommerce site as we are NOT selling anything through the site. Its just a showcase.
Especially if you don't ever want to sell: Don't use a framework. Use Wordpress! Create a site for every product, and link them appropriately. Use a theme that allows you to group sites.
This way you work with a CMS you are familiar with, you have the advantage of all the Wordpress goodies (permalinks come to mind), and you don't have to code much at all.
Opencart is a great solution can be easy moded as product catalog
Check their forums