Why CMS?

CaldwellYSR

Member
Okay so I have absolutely zero experience building for a client. I've worked on a couple sites for friends that never ended up online and they were both static sites. I have done some reasearch into wordpress, joomla!, and drupal but I don't understand why they would be needed for most sites. They all seem very blog oriented. I know CMS is a good idea because it allows people that don't know code to edit the site but I don't see how any of them can be used effectively on other sites. I have the Joomla! essential training videos from Lynda but I can't make it past a few chapters without wanting to hang myself. It's just so slow and it doesn't seem like I can use this to build anything that's not a freaking blog? I know the answer is probably just keep watching the videos, all will be revealed... but before I go on is it even worth it to learn Joomla!? It doesn't seem to be useable at all... just seems easier to write my own code for anything that isn't a blog or isn't updated every other day.
 

ronaldroe

Super Moderator
Staff member
IMHO, Joomla is the most flexible of them. I built an absurdly simple site using Joomla (an artist's gallery), yet it's capable of incredibly complex sites. The answer isn't necessarily finishing the videos. I never watched any. The nice thing is that, for the most part, you can code your layout and just plug in the Joomla PHP. It isn't always that simple, but it is much of the time.
 

CaldwellYSR

Member
See just and artists gallery seems so absurd with Joomla.... I don't know why... I just can't get the blog feel out of my head. I may just need to stop with the videos and start playing with joomla myself first...
 

CaldwellYSR

Member
Okay so I've worked with Joomla for the past week or so and I have to say my immediate reaction was very unfair to Joomla. I've now made my own template and started putting together a website and it's coming together nicely. I think what got me was the terminology of Joomla. When you're talking about articles and catagories and everything just feels like it's supposed to be a blog. but when I took a step back and realized that articles linked to menus just make new pages and catagories are basically used for organization and I've made my own theme that works the way I actually need it to work..... it all feels much better and I'm very happy with it. So basically thanks ronaldroe for kinda talking me into not giving up on joomla too soon.
 

Pheno

New Member
Yep articles is a misleading name. A couple of the major content extensions (K2 and flexicontent) call them "items" instead, which is better!
 

wicasso

New Member
People use CMS because it's easier and faster to build a website instead of writing the code from scratch. I think Drupal is the best CMS now and future.
Build a free great Drupal site

In Drupal, it is also easier and more flexible to design custom themes.

Instead of designing a theme from scratch or changing other themes, Drupal has many base/starter themes that help designers to design, customize a theme or port their existing HTML design ... without coding.

My favorite Drupal's base/starter theme is AdaptiveTheme :

http://drupal.org/project/adaptivetheme

.
 

Fireproofgfx

New Member
If you are use to designing your own site and coding it the way you want to then you can use https://www.freecms.com/ which basically, you set div tags <div class="editable"></div> where you want to allow the client to have free reign to edit.
 

Janja

New Member
I use Wordpress as cms of my choice. I started building the same site in Joomla and Wordpress to find out which one I liked more. I gave up on Joomla although people say it has so many good features. My point is: if it's so confusing to me, how is my customer going to handle it.
I use a full cms for customers who want to add/delete pages or want a blog. I use cushycms.com (same as mentioned above) if they only want to change content in existing pages.
 

Pheno

New Member
Yes, I think Joomla's main drawback is that you cannot get it to automatically create menu items when you create a page. There are work arounds but it's fairly clunky.
 

dreamcon

New Member
CMS helps user to add new content on the website quick and fast. More content = great information= search engine loves content = your site ranks higher
 
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