Why Joomla sucks!
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!
LMAO.. Im glad others too have noticed.. nicely said Linford
Joomla is an absolute joke. I can – and did – code a complete website faster with PHP/CSS/mySql/flash & AS2 faster than with Joomla. Why? Joomla did not work “out of the box”. Links are broken on the default install (404 errors on the pdf/print buttons).
I do this stuff for a living and wanted to see what the “buzz” was about. Now I know. LOL
My horror story began about a year ago when I was approached and asked to help refresh an existing site. The first clue to run was that the site was running Joomla and using the Virtuemart component with a 500+ product base. The second clue to run was when after finalizing the requirements and discovering that there would have to be extensive customization to how both Joomla and Virtuemart operated and flow with each other. The final clue came right before I was in too deep. I reviewed all of this and suggested a different CMS, but one of the site operators was terrified of change and already knew how to use the combination so my suggestion was rejected.
After I started working on the project my designer got frustrated pretty quickly while trying to deal with just the nuances of how templates are handled. While I can only relate to you how he felt about the design portion I can tell you that my frustration began when I started working on the first series of customizations. What, in my mind, should have been some rather simple changes turned out to be a time consuming process and many times required me to rewrite large blocks of code. Sometimes it felt like I was trudging through a wasteland of poorly written or overly cryptic (deliberately?) code. Some of the things I saw did not make sense at all. Other things I saw made me wonder how something like this would get past any form of quality control. While I understand Joomla is open source and supported by the community, there should still be some form of quality control.
My final thoughts on Joomla are:
It’s codebase is a bloated, convoluted mess.
If you do want to use it then rely only on the stock templates/components/modules or try to find some that match as closely as you require. Try not to make any customizations.
If you have problems don’t rely on trying to find a concise source of support.
Don’t do it…
Joomla is the most user unfriendly backend in the entire world. My clients hate it, I hate. WordPress is vastly easier for clients to use and vastly easier to code templates. I saw on another post that Joomla can do more than WordPress. LOL how so? You can’t even embed video without have to install a plugin orchange the admin settings. I say YES joomla is the best CMS as long as you are in competition with me.
How is anyone actually supposed to manage their content with joomla? Im coming from a WordPress background where there clearly defined categories, or taxonomies. And this…. Joomla? WTH!?!?!?! I hate to jump to conclusion but after a about three weeks with Joomla, I hate it. I have spent almost a week trying to find a viable photo album option and they all suck. With WP, this would be as simple as installing NEXTGen Gallery and moving on. Or simply use featured images. Now let me spend another 4 weeks on figuring out how to use thumbnails with joomla articles. Oh wait, one guy 3 years ago on some sparse forum said that the best way to use thumbnails with joomla was to use this extension with this extension and buy this component, and upgrade to joomla 1.5.12.9.74.58 but dont upgrade to version 1.5.12.9.74.59 yet cause none of the extensions, plugins, components, or modules will be compatible for another year even though they are commercial plugins. I think rather than using Joomla, I am going to pay someone to come sit behind me and slap me in the top of my skull with a long wooden spoon repeatedly.
Just had to add an ‘article’ to a clients site – which unfortunately was joomla. I nearly put my fist through the monitor in dealing with the backend. It’s awful and the WSIWYG editor is horrible – so much so that the guy who set the site up was using images for a lot of the text as it wouldn’t show properly. Then trying to add menu items again took up about 30 minutes of my time dicking around.
Anyway, steer clear of this junk.
I am a hardcore developer, made several CMS systems and web portal. I can tell you the logic of Joomla is horrifying me and I feel pity for people wasting their brain learning this logic. I am glad I stayed away from Joomla all these years and will continue doing so.
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I was asked to get a club’s Joomla 1.5 website fixed after it got broken. I got it up and running, but it is held together with duct tape and nails (www.pedsac.co.za). After a whole year of trying to get to grips with Joomla, I finally quit. Good idea – bad product. It truly is a “time-sink” like Linford put it.
The free extensions are even worse. They are free because they are useless.
Back to the future with raw HTML!