So I got this job from a customer: setup a design from a sliced PSD file into some CSS formatted XHTML. Fair enough, that couldn’t be that hard – and it wasn’t. The real pain the in ass is NOW:
I have to set the darn thing up so it can run in Joomla! I’ve heard good things about Joomla in the past and I thought it would be a pleasure to do so. But I was wrong – boy was I wrong?!
First of all I got this horizontal menu at the top. I made it so it beautifully supports sub-items, nicely done in jQuery and in CSS. But since Joomla can’t generate the menu correctly itself I now have to hack Joomla and the menu in order to get the right view. It could have been nicely done if just Joomla offered some kind of advanced template functions like: “getMenuItems($menuId)”. I guess I’m just frustrated, I’ll move on to the some of the other stuff I guess – or so I thought.
I thought I could setup the place where the content goes but nooooooo. The div where the content goes is very specific with paddings, margins and width but I thought that putting in some content wouldn’t fuck that up but I was wrong again. Because for some unknown reason Joomla had to create nested divs, tables and what not inside my perfect CSS. And I can’t really hack this part because the “content holder” that Joomla uses is reused by all of it’s freaking components. I begin to wonder if it would be easier and faster to create this freaking thing from scratch!
I just gave up for today with a little hope though all of these freaking problems today. Because I maybe found a secret weapon within Joomla, an API – yes you read right! An API! The holy grail for a lot of developers as myself which do not accept the second best solution. But now I got a new problem! Only like 5 or 10% of this holy grail is documented in their API reference wiki.
Please comment or contact me if you got some solutions to some of my problems, if you are a Joomla geek or if you also got problems with Joomla and want to get it of your chest – just like I just did 
Joomla sucks. Joomla is smoke and mirrors. It promises a lot, delivers nothing. Joomla is a time-sink–it takes up whatever time you have and you’re still left with nothing. I spent three months trying to get Joomla to perform, knocking myself out, results: 0. Joomla is unstable, vastly buggy, comes with no support, generates crappy code, is largely undiagnosable. When I saw Joomla generate 25 nested divs, I knew Joomla is a horrible endeavor. If you think you have it hard now, it only gets worse. I returned to Dreamweaver. I’m a web designer and have no interest becoming my own programming consultant. If you want to create or maintain a website, do it the old-fashioned and time-tested way using the likes of Dreamweaver. There are no shortcuts. Joomla’s reason for being is that “it’s a shortcut”–but really, Joomla is a longcut. An analogy is you want to travel from San Francisco to New York–Dreamweaver gets you from SF to NY by way of Chicago competently–Joomla gets you from SF to NY by way of China–actually Joomla never reaches NY–it strands you in China–you’re left standing scratching your head asking how the hell did I get to here to China? Joomla is the worst software I’ve ever encountered. Learn the likes of Dreamweaver!
Linford
May 28th, 2010