Your thoughts on joomla..?

Is it just me or does it seem any site with joomla and a fair amount of plugins installed is

1. slow as hell to load
2. piss poor as far as being search engine friendly

Half the time doing shit like optimization of the site or enabling "seo friendly urls" just breaks half the plugins or causes a boatload of errors.

Really I have about 15 joomla sites but I'm thinking from this point out to take a different route (phpnuke, wordpress)

Joomla just seems to bulky, too full of security holes, and too prone to error.

Anyone here actually use joomla? Any other recommendations?

I have used Joomla and Wodpress - about a year ago I switched to just WP. I agree about bulky and slow at times. With all the plugins and themes available for WP I can get any kind of site I want up very quickly.

I used to use Joomla alot and think it's pretty good for some situations, it does take a lot of CPU so best not used on shared hosting - but on a VPS it has decent speed. I never used many plugins - the more you use the more likely you are to have a "security issue".

I ditched it too in favor of WP.
Joomla is getting harder and harder to use and I think the developers are backing themselves into a corner trying to keep up with the latest seo. As you say, you need loads of plugins etc just to get your site SEO friendly and it is as slow as hell.

blacktrilby said:

I ditched it too in favor of WP.
Joomla is getting harder and harder to use and I think the developers are backing themselves into a corner trying to keep up with the latest seo. As you say, you need loads of plugins etc just to get your site SEO friendly and it is as slow as hell.

Click to expand...

Do you ever use drupal? Or solely wordpress?

I didn't like joomla. Its heavy. Hard to really quickly post new content. the modules are ok but the better ones are paid modules. I much rather use wordpress. Just my 2 cents.

I tried it once a couple years ago and it just felt weird and clunky after using wordpress for so long. I haven't tried it since then so I don't know much about it but is there any reason to use it instead of WP?

I have a joomla site I have been using for about a year and a half now. I really what I have been able to do with the site, but the learning curb for joomla is steep. A few months ago I upgraded to the ver. 1.5.15 and my site ended up being down for two weeks. First, I have to upgraded my template which I had to re-purchase. Second, many of the plug-ins I was using was not compatiable with the new version. I also have a few wp sites and they are easier and cheaper to maintain. My only beef with wp sites is that they tend to be rather rigid unless you can write code.

jamoola is better

ive been involved with the development of over 300+ sites now for joomla - and am currently involved with the development of one of largest ever joomla websites ever built with over 300k users! additionally i have spoken publically alongside with the co-founder of joomla and then lead developer specifically about joomla and seo. i teach people how to use joomla and successfully optimize it for their business just last friday i did a 6hr workshop so that gives you a little idea of how involved i am with it... i love it! lol for me it is the best thing since sliced bread! lol

i have no issues with SEO what so ever and have actually built a very successful web development/seo business around it.

to say you need tons of plugins to make it seo friendly is nonesense, joomla can be used with sef urls straight out of the box with no additional plugins simply rename your htaccess file and change some parameters in your global configuration and your good to go - if it doesnt work read the instructions, its usually a simple matter of un-commenting a line of code, this is down to your server configuration not joomla...

if you actually read the documentation you can simply modify your template to output search engine friendly code - if that doesnt tickle your fancy - sh404sef is just one plugin that will meet the majority of your seo requirements

those people experiencing issues with it regards to it running slow or having security issues are possibly using poorly written 3rd party add ons, i am more than happy to discuss those problems and give you advice on how to resolve those additionally just like with wordpress you HAVE TO keep your plugins up dated for security issues...

if developers properly used the MVC framework compatibility between extensions would not be a problem, but they dont and even some of the more popular extensions surprisingly dont either...

for a site to be down for 2 weeks just because it was upgraded seems bizarre what did you upgrade it from i am thinking from joomla 1.0 to jooml 1.5 if thats the case i can see you having problem, and if thats the case am not sure why you where even using joomla 1.0 when its support stopped last july and joomla 1.5 has been available as a stable release since perhaps october 2007, 2.5 yrs ago - upgrading now from j1.0 to j1.15 is not for a noob... We upgraded possibly 200 sites to joomla 1.15.15 from j1.15.14 the day it was released without a single glitch...

me and my guys are very experienced with php/mysql as well as the joomla framework but still we dont have these issues that we hear all the time.... for the most part when addressing stuff like this its usually down to like i said poorly written 3rd party apps, poorly configured servers or user error.

sadly the resources to learn joomla are for the most part simply to overwhelming which makes the learn curve even more diffcult - most people will try and customize joomla by modifying the sample data thats installed - i hate that, the sample causes even more confusion than anything else

joomla is used by mtv, spike tv, united nations, ihop but to name a few people am thinking if its ok for them its ok for most peoples 10 page website! lol

at the end of the day everyone to their own - use what works for you... but if you do decide to use joomla or have any questions i am more than happy to help

thanks

uke

sorry for spelling/grammer errors am feeling like crap and am writing this from bed! lol

IMHO Use joomla if you have big scale website like online store, membership, etc, but use WP if you only have small scale site like blog

I don't have any speed issues with joomla - and I have a slow connection, so speed is important to me for the websites I develop... and there's a lot you can do to make Joomla faster
But I would agree that Joomla isn't the right script for a simple blog or a few-page site.

Well, that's ukescuba. the resident joomla expert of BHW! I too am a joomla savvy, and i prefer using joomla since it's backend is pretty professional as well as its frontend.

joomla is used to build web-sites and powerful online application
so that high speed net is used to use joomla

lol, I knew UKescuba would be hear somewhere

I have been battling with Joomla since october, I'm completely useless at any kind of coding and usually get put off by entering any code. It's true there is a steep learning curve (in my opinion) compared to WP, but like UKescuba said that's due to poor tutorials out there.
My site was really slow too, sure I did install a multitude of plugins trying to figure out what worked for me, but after a fresh install I found the biggest culprite was my template slowing down my website with masses of unnecessary code.

Even before I got the hang of Joomla I always prefered the overall look compared to the bland WP look that always looks the same (especially squeeze pages). Overall I think joomla is far better and has more site options other than just being a blog.

P.S. Yes I'm signed up with UKescuba's offer, he helps you out with many issues that you usually have trouble finding information about

I personally dislike Joomla. I have used WP for a long time and recently tried Joomla for a recent project of mine. It was extremely difficult to get everything working properly and it is far from being optimized for google. Maybe its just because i'm a total noob at Joomla that things haven't gone well but I haven't really seen anything good from it. If it is possible I would go over to WP as there is a lot of great things you can do on it.

I know what you mean macpaulos about it looking better than WP but if you either find a really good template (that isn't common) or go and try and customize a more common one then I do think that you can get something that has almost the same if not better aesthetics.

@ukescuba it didn't actually take two weeks to do the software upgrade itself. It took me two weeks because needed to upgrade my template to a compatitable 1.5 version and then I needed to do all the customizations to my site. I had been draggin ass to do the upgrade to joomla ver. 1.5. My business website is a joomla site and it is awesome.

Dmore said:

@ukescuba it didn't actually take two weeks to do the software upgrade itself. It took me two weeks because needed to upgrade my template to a compatitable 1.5 version and then I needed to do all the customizations to my site. I had been draggin ass to do the upgrade to joomla ver. 1.5. My business website is a joomla site and it is awesome.

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sounds like you where going from j1.0 to j1.5 - a little bit late now but did you know there is a parameter you can enable called legacy mode which for the most part would have allowed your j1.0 template to work in j1.5 without any changes it also works for a number of older extensions too

certainly not recommended now but anyone else with that issue its worth checking it out

joomla also doesn't rank as well as wordpress in the serps, from the testing that i have read people done. you will need a lot more effort..

pwntribe said:

Is it just me or does it seem any site with joomla and a fair amount of plugins installed is

1. slow as hell to load
2. piss poor as far as being search engine friendly

Half the time doing shit like optimization of the site or enabling "seo friendly urls" just breaks half the plugins or causes a boatload of errors.

Really I have about 15 joomla sites but I'm thinking from this point out to take a different route (phpnuke, wordpress)

Joomla just seems to bulky, too full of security holes, and too prone to error.

Anyone here actually use joomla? Any other recommendations?

Click to expand...

Just want to take a moment to put my .02 cents in on the 1/2 points you have

1st, wordpress has the easiest user experience of all the systems. I know some retarded ass people, and the only solution that works consistently with their stupidity is wordrpess. hell look at [secondthought-notsaying].com, they crank out content and they are all retarded. joomla is actually too hard and complicated.

1) slow
SOLUTION: identical solution to just about every php based framework (even some java ones): use nginx, memcached, php-fpm, APC and a well tuned mysql db. never ever use Apache, just in case you do. it's garbage. I can handle hundreds of concurrent connections a second for hours at a time on machine that only has 1/2 a gig of ram. without the right memory management and server side work, you will never be pleased with the ultimate result of ANY CMS. Don't care how awful your code could be, or how fat your template is, if you have distributed memory cache, your site will load fast as hell (so long as you hold that cache for a long time)
PREFERENCE: I prefer wordpress, i manage many sites running it. It is extremely easy to manage, write custom plugins, and with a good permalink structure, easily slay the majority of SEO expert consultants out there simply by organizing your content well.

2) seo crappy
SOLUTION: organize your content with volume related url structures using re-write rules. write a post, assign it to the child category of potentially several parent categories, who happen to have the grammar and keywords you are looking for. Make sure your sitemaps take advantage of that most importantly, which may mean not including content on an individual basis from the sitemap. let the social network world handle the individual posts.