worklog

I can’t remember if I blogged about this earlier, but a friend passed me a link to this series on using open source software to do a corporate website. It is a pretty good read:

Using open source software to design, develop, and deploy a collaborative Web site

One CMS that they leave out is Joomla which I guess would be more or less equivalent to Mambo for purposes of the article since they have the same parentage. Joomla has undergone some pretty serious reorganization from Mambo and their road map is interesting, but in my experience with Joomla, I have to agree with their basic critique of Mambo:

The easy installation seemed to get us to a point where almost all the function we needed was available and ready to be themed. However, as with many CMSs, the templating is limited to a tag system that leaves you at the mercy of the quality of the markup that is substituted for the tags. This is fine if the markup is valid, semantically structured, and adequately sprinkled with CSS ID and class attributes to aid styling. If it isn’t, then you can find yourself delving into the guts of the application to figure out how to correct the generated output.

I found Joomla pretty easy to get started with, but then building custom components was problematic and the documentation didn’t cover why you would do something one way or another or how to elegantly tie components into modules into categories…