FUNside

This website used Joomla. I installed it because I thought it fitted the purpose of the website. The reality of things taught me though that I had outgrown the open source CMSs – or even worse that the expectations users have these days for online applications are beyond the capabilities of these old development frameworks.

The only reason I installed it in the first place was to have a Joomla familiarity and to keep an eye on it’s development as it is portrayed as the next best thing in open source content management systems (CMS). I even put in the effort of downloading and installing the latest version before so that I’m not dismissing this CMS unjustifiably.

When I first installed Joomla, I noticed the easy to use control panel (CP) and at the same how restrictive it was in letting you modify things not available in the CP. In other words, if it’s not in the CP as an option, you can’t modify it.

For example, it didn’t have an option to change the location of the favicon in the CP and that meant I had to look for it in the labyrinth of directories and functions the CMS has semi-organized.

And that was the tip of the iceberg in regards to the tweaks I had to do to the core files. Actually I was forced to do so many modifications to make a standards-compliant website that I’m reluctant in upgrading Joomla to future versions. And if you add the incompatibilities of the plugins that an upgrade may bring – well, this is not web designing – this is web torturing.

The truth is simple:

Having HTML inside the PHP code is something unjustifiably wrong. It doesn’t help the templating of the system and it makes the upgrading a risky process.

In the end it became a personal obsession, that I could actually do it (make my CSS design run on Joomla that is). It took me far more time than I planned to bring up to the point that I wanted and it still needs more work to get all the areas perfect. And it will never be perfect… The site feels like an enormous amount of ugliness carefully hidden with elegant markup in the front-end, only waiting to burst in the users face uncontrollably.

Not to be a fan boy of the competition but I could’ve done the same things with MODx or WordPress and it would be lot cleaner both in the front-end and back. Note: FUNside now uses WordPress…

Sorry for all this negativity – it’s just that I had to record my discouragement of using this CMS system for the site. All this reminds me the rise and fall of another (once) popular CMS – PHP-Nuke. As they say, history tends to repeat itself…