Joomla has astounded me so far with just how easy it was to set up.
Most of my surprise comes from this page; after I finished installing it, I was presented with the screen above. Without any effort on your part, you have a great starting point for what you intend your website to do.
This is what I have after my experimenting and such. I focused much more on the system itself rather then how you can customize it's appearance.
One thing that I did like related to the appearance was how easy it was to add and customize menu's, including adding options that only certain groups could see. Such as above, where if a user is registered they have a link to "edit profile", or super users with "site settings". It's easy to add & change general layout stuff, and for some features it includes a WYSIWYG editor.
With articles, I enjoyed that it was easy to add/drag N drop images into articles, with the abiliy to resize them in the text box. You are also able to modify who can see what parts of the page, and there is a seperate tab for things like the author, meta data, hit count, and revision number. Something that bugged me, however, was that the default image insert dialogue box only gives you what's inside the site; you can't search through desktop folders. The upside is that it's not a big deal, and it's easy to just drag and drop what you want.
On the security side of things, I like that the site handles itself sort of like a network, with things like users and user groups. It's easy to set up several admins, and several types of admins, and for what sections, etc.
It also makes you relog every so often; I think about every hour, keeping things secure, and without that much of a bother. The site also features easy-to-setup 2 factor authentication. The funny inverse to all of this, is unlike both of the other sites I used, I set my username and password as "username" and "password" without Joomla batting an eye. Wordpress has you confirm it through a dialogue box and Drupal warns you.
Something else that I enjoyed, although this does not particularly make it stand out, is the sheer number of extensions. These are, so far uniquely, categorized and sorted for easy browsing.
Now, having said this, something that DID bug me was that they offer paid extensions. These are extensions that cost money, and then might not work, or might not be what you want, or down the road not need it anymore. It's a choice, but because of the optional paywall, the majority of extensions I saw were premium. Something else that bugged me was that they offered a "install from web" option, which didn't work. I'm not sure if it was because of MAMP, or some other local issue, but it offered no fixes either way.
Something else that was...intriguing, was the private message system.
This...seems totally pointless to me. If you have multiple users, then presumably they each have emails...what is the point of using a "private message" over an email? Email is more reliable and more personalized then an entirely new system that performs the same function. Convenience is the only explanation I can think of.
Semi-relatedly, you are able to mass email all of your users using Joomla. This is defenitely for convenience, and it actually is, as you dont have to hunt down all of the different emails each user uses; this tool already has all of them.
Templates, the main method of customzing Joomla, was nice because it focused on CSS, meaning it was easy to interpret as a web developer and modify yourself. There are also plenty of options that are normally lenghty to add to CSS, such as settings things as static vs fluid.
One thing that I did like related to the appearance was how easy it was to add and customize menu's, including adding options that only certain groups could see. Such as above, where if a user is registered they have a link to "edit profile", or super users with "site settings". It's easy to add & change general layout stuff, and for some features it includes a WYSIWYG editor.
With articles, I enjoyed that it was easy to add/drag N drop images into articles, with the abiliy to resize them in the text box. You are also able to modify who can see what parts of the page, and there is a seperate tab for things like the author, meta data, hit count, and revision number. Something that bugged me, however, was that the default image insert dialogue box only gives you what's inside the site; you can't search through desktop folders. The upside is that it's not a big deal, and it's easy to just drag and drop what you want.
On the security side of things, I like that the site handles itself sort of like a network, with things like users and user groups. It's easy to set up several admins, and several types of admins, and for what sections, etc.It also makes you relog every so often; I think about every hour, keeping things secure, and without that much of a bother. The site also features easy-to-setup 2 factor authentication. The funny inverse to all of this, is unlike both of the other sites I used, I set my username and password as "username" and "password" without Joomla batting an eye. Wordpress has you confirm it through a dialogue box and Drupal warns you.
Something else that I enjoyed, although this does not particularly make it stand out, is the sheer number of extensions. These are, so far uniquely, categorized and sorted for easy browsing.
Something else that was...intriguing, was the private message system.
Semi-relatedly, you are able to mass email all of your users using Joomla. This is defenitely for convenience, and it actually is, as you dont have to hunt down all of the different emails each user uses; this tool already has all of them.
Templates, the main method of customzing Joomla, was nice because it focused on CSS, meaning it was easy to interpret as a web developer and modify yourself. There are also plenty of options that are normally lenghty to add to CSS, such as settings things as static vs fluid.
The help page was very in-depth and semi-categorized. This sort of brings me to my conclusion about Joomla; this is a platform for small business owners, or independent artists, or other freelance-related jobs. Based upon the support for users, for communicating with them and for setting things that can be viewed by some user groups and others that can't, this is not meant for bloggers.
My issues were few, and overall I was satisfied with how Joomla worked. I am excited for checking the rest out!
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