Joomla - I Need A Hands On Lesson

[Snooks]

I decided a few weeks ago to try and learn Joomla. WordPress is ok but i just think that there are too many WP sites out there and Joomla seems to me, to look so much nicer and in many ways, it appears better for my purpose.

Ive been fiddling and also reading The Dummies Guide To Joomla, but i now think that I almost certainly need to sit down with a person thats very conversant with Joomla and have him, or her, spend an hour or so just showing me things, showing me exactly what to do. That way I may be able to comprehend it better because at the moment I seem to be going in circles and achieving nothing.

So I am looking for a person in Sydney, preferabbly towards Western Sydney that can provide me an hour of their time. Weekends certainly suit me the best and I can fit in with whatever time frame you have in mind.

Anyone that has an interest in assisting me is requested to contact via pm so we can discuss costs, times and relevent details.

Thank you

 

[zhenjie]

Be sure to state what they get in 'return' for their valuable time though.

Joomla is a great system and since v1.6 its quite easy to learn and get your head around in. Some great video tutorials but yeah, 1 hour sit down with someone knowledgeable with it is quite good. Its best to do a 'hands on', actually know what type of site you want to develop and get a tutorial that way.

 

[Snooks]

Be sure to state what they get in 'return' for their valuable time though.

Thats why i closed with

so we can discuss costs, times and relevent details.

I wouldnt expect them to do this for nothing, time is money and we all have bills to pay

 

[nina]

I work with DotNetNuke - it's sort of like a .net version of the php cms Joomla. I found that Joomla was incredibly confusing with it's interface and how you do things, although WP did take the cake for making something square to be round.

We do alot of php work but for more complex projects, and my son who has worked with PHP, Perl, CGI, you name it, still uses DotNetNuke over Joomla for the 'end user' experience as well as not feeling confident about finding solid support for it in the long term.

There are some other very nice small cms products around - http://www.silverstripe.com/ it might work for you in reference to simplicity.

It depends what you want to do - do you want to just add content, change the designs, add on a module or third party extensions?

One hour would be tight - do you have it installed? do you need a local installer so you can work on it remotely?

http://www.peterbui.net/ this guy does Joomla Training and he's in Sydney - and he has a blog too - http://www.pbwebdev.com.au/blog/ which has many elements of Joomla supported. He might be a start. And there are some very specific courses here - http://www.joomtraining.com.au/ - I think if it were me I'd be booking into a class with some structured training which usually gives you materials that are relevant to you to take home.

I guess what you need to do is start with pen and paper and be very specific in what you want to learn about because one > two hours is not much time to pick something up.

Hope this points you into the right direction if there are no Joomla gurus on this forum to help you.

Nina

 

[joe]

I work with DotNetNuke

ewww... if there's one cms I dislike more than Joomla it's dotnetnuke.

You should check out Umbraco for .net, quite nice.

 

[neddy]

ewww...

Are you a Kiwi?

 

[joe]

Are you a Kiwi?

?????!?!?!?

i'm not, but I do work with a couple of 'em. Still no idea where you're coming from, though

does "ewww" resemble a kiwi mating call or something?

 

[nina]

ewww... if there's one cms I dislike more than Joomla it's dotnetnuke.

You should check out Umbraco for .net, quite nice.

I know umbraco. I'm not here to hijack the thread since the question was about Joomla .

... However, I've been using dotnetnuke for close on 8 years, with millions of installs, as opposed to Umbraco reaching over 100,000 now, so it's still to new for me to venture into.

The licensing model is what stops large companies from using other applications, apart from the fact they may natively be Microsoft houses with their business model, they therefore would use a .NET app. The licensing model explicitly allows someone to download the code, and use it for their own purposes, commercially, without risk, unlike the GPL and GNU licensing model that in plain english can hold companies liable to return their IP back to the community as per linux guidelines.

So companies looking to use the framework (which is really what DNN is - it's a framework, rather than a CMS) to further develop on the Microsoft platform of tools, with confidence that they can manage their IP without any liability down the track, will use a product like this.

There is also this flavour about many CMS products - including umbraco - it's like Avon perfume.. where people don't say - you smell nice.. they say - are you wearing Avon?

The skinning flexibility of DotNetNuke is also one of more diverse around, which is what I'm known for and have been involved in hundreds and hundreds, of projects over the last 8 years, all based around the framework.

But yes, there is a market for Joomla and WordPress. I have used them both, I have WP for my blogs, but I do primarily use DotNetNuke because that is why people call me for advise and pay to fix, build, repair, skin, design, deploy, host, troubleshoot, whatever.. anything DNN.

It is also the best 'site replicator' that I have worked with allowing to setup hundreds of sites under the same code base, sharing module licensing and skin elements, which is what I've been working on for my domain names lately so I can replicate the site, even bind to different IP addresses, and have different looks and feel about it.

I did a wonderful site for a honda dealer who resells sites to honda dealers. She will sell these for a low cost per year, to dealers, all using templateable designs, unique look and feel but with common content in an easy to use interface.

ANNNNYway... sorry to add to this thread, but I wanted to clarify why I use this product, and that each product has merits - I'm just one who reads and analyses and tests things before I comment on them and found my experience with Joomla was not an easy one, and I'm a technical person, but my clients and my business model is based upon supporting DotNetNuke and I can solve most problems with my eyes shut.

How much so... well I had a problem on something which I found frustrating for a couple of weeks, I tried everything I could think of.. so I finally gave in and googled it.. and guess what - I found the answer...ON MY OWN WEBSITE.. answered by ME.. two years ago, in beautiful, exact detail.

I told a colleague what a dufus I was.. and he nicely put it.. I've forgotten more about DotNetNuke than others may ever learn in the first place.

Nina

 

[Snooks]

Thanks for the comments and information Nina, i appreciate it

 

[gravitymarketing]

Hello, just joined today, I was about to go over and write a hello in the intro thread but I bumped into this and thought I would just offer some advice first.

1. When purchasing training, try watching a video before / after the training you purchase

For your training needs. I can assume that you prefer something hands on because perhaps you are more of a business mind than a nerd. In this case, I strongly recommend the use of lynda DOT com, or (or if you want it free, there are several free youtube series). Spend a small amount of time doing this training, which is almost as good as somebody showing you the ropes. Have your own joomla installed so you can perform exercises as you are being trained. After you have spent say 30 even 60 minutes on the training. You will now get a lot more leverage out of the face to face training.

Of course, if your time is extremely scarce then face to face is going to save you time for that extra money you spend.

One other note I can give you based on my experience training people on CMS's, I find that my many of my clients will be taught something then not use it for 6 months+. This is why I generally have training videos available on my web site for them to come back and refresh on something. And why i strongly advocate video media for training.

Lets say its 12 months time, you revisit adding new users to your web site as you employ somebody new, you immediately think "how did you get taught that again in training last year?".

Unless you find a really good training firm that leaves you with structured training notes, you might be left with written notes from your training. If you had purchased the lynda training and worked with that during your training, you can refer to it later. Just make sure you get a copy that you can use later rather than viewing it online.

Hope this helps. Also, regarding your decision to choose Joomla, I offer a small writeup on this too as a friendly hello to DNtrade.

2. If you are going to use a CMS, why not use Wordpress which is about 10x as big as the next biggest one, if not a lot more.

- Wordpress

Wordpress is the world's most popular CMS, primarily because of ease of use and extensibility. If you want an invoicing or project management plugin, just download it for free and plug it into the CMS. Even for non technical end users, you can get your developer to extend your CMS at a greatly reduced cost using wordpress because its mostly free.

My recommendation would be to use Wordpress. According to Wikipedia, at the time of writing Wordpress are used on 14% of the world's top 1 million web sites, and "the most popular CMS on the internet".

Despite its roots as a blogroll software, you can create pages in the form of any CMS and make it into your standard web site. Wordpress is extremely flexible for practically any use.

- Joomla

Joomla is also good, almost as good. At the time of writing Joomla quote around 2% of the internet use their CMS (on their own web site from their own research). Its a good CMS, in fact I am close to volunteering with joomla as I participate quite frequently in their chat on irc.freenode.org #joomla and to date I have around 20 implementations of Joomla. When i install I like to put around 20 plugins on the system, including my own custom administration console. This being said, the community has less members and is slightly less active, which is a small bummer, and has implications for security.

Joomla has recently ramped up production after being stagnant at joomla 1.5 for a number of years they have committed to a 6 month production cycle, so we have seen joomla 1.6 and now joomla 1.7 in the period of 1 year. I believe we can continue to see it improve as a strong platform into the future.

As for which is better, out of the box, if you just installed both, i think wordpress is better, especially for a new user. If you install plugins, they are both very similar if not the same in quality.

If you look at who uses joomla in say world's top 1000 web sites and why. Generally you will find that complex sites with hundreds of categories can start to choose joomla. For instance Ebay uses it for the Questions and Answers area because of Joomla's category and article management system.

This is not to say it cant be used as a simple CMS like wordpress. It is commonly used for the small business with 10-20 menu items too.

Either of these are good, so are PHP frameworks like mentioned previously, Of course its a lot about opinion and subjective in the development market.

Using a framework for a CMS

dotnuke is a great framework, also very common, I dont know the statistics on adoption but I'm sure its very high, perhaps around the same as joomla.

I do feel like it relies slightly more on a developer doing more complicated changes, though, and this will cost more. This could be a good or a bad thing. If your business is at a size where you have a developer helping you, you are often better off using a framework that is specifically designed to your needs, and can have better performance.

I'll leave you with one last note which although technical might be useful. One problem you have using Joomla OR wordpress is that in order to make it easily updated and a 'cms', it adds a bit of weight, making your page load slower. Also, Joomla is a very old system based on something that used to be called 'mambo' and it uses very old code. A lot of modern programmers mock CMS's because things like the Zend Framework, Codeigniter, or Symfony2 could achieve the exact same thing much better. I think this is what the above posters are talking about.

However, you can get at least 75% similar efficiency if you just have a wordpress or joomla installed and use proper implementation that has some sort of cache installed. All this said, unless your site is running slow, all this fancy technical jargon isnt really that useful, (other than google rating SEO on speed more recently). So really, you can just pay somebody to tune your cache settings if/when this becomes a problem.

Conclusion

If you are a smaller business, you may find a more lean/cost effective model using something which is 'ready out of the box', and I point you to wordpress first, joomla second and there is one called drupal which i rate as third.

Cheers

Jeremy

 

[Snooks]

Welcome to the forums Jeremy and i very much appreciate your tips.

I have around 25 domain names that need mini sites and some need real sites so believe me, once i learn it, i have so much to do that i wont be able to forget it.

I never even thought of youtube.....thats the last thing i ever think of.

Will check that out right now