For a while I’ve wanted a better way to manage my (non Wordpress) webpages. I had been using Dreamweaver, with a local copy of the site and uploading changes, but this limited me to one machine and wasn’t flexible. Editing files by hand can be tedious, and uploading any documents/files/images can be slow and requires an FTP application (again fine if I’m at my own machine).

I’ve always had a soft spot for static pages, with no dynamic content, pure html, no php or server side includes. They are cache and proxy friendly, wih no burden on the webserver and keep-things-simple. I guess my homepage is the ultimate example of this The rest of my pages use a Dreamweaver template. I’ve also had a softspot for non-white background pages, this dates right back to Netscape 2 when the default background colour was grey and not white. I always found pages far easier to ready on a grey background, and that’s why my static pages are grey and my blog is on a fetching shade of green.

I had tried Mambo a few years a go, and had recently tried Drupal. While Drupal gets rave reviews, it appeared to have a steep learning curve and would take some setting up. I also fancied a wysiwyg editor (yes I know, not very geek-like).

Wordpress is actually an excellent CMS, for my needs at least.

• great wysiwyg editor
• works out of the box, no complex setting up
• easy to change themes
• easy to start creating pages.
• Good, simple, friendly URLs

In fact Wordpress my still win out! Though I think I would want to set up a different installation for non-blog pages. As you can see (if you are reading via my site and not via a feed) all the pages I have created in Wordpress are on the left, and there seems little control of how this side of things works.

Anyway, I’m trying out Joomla. Another great one-click install thanks to Dreamhost.

The backend is amazing, and seems easier to get started with than Drupal. The default content is actually very helpful in learning the ropes. The interface is very plesant to use, and surpases many client based apps. This is not a review, but some notes:

• Basic things seem missing, such as linking to files or linking to other pages within the joomla system. These to me seem like basic and key functionality. Uploading pdf/powerpoint/docs in Wordpress is so easy that almost anyone can pick up how. With Joomla, the advice seems to be upload the file using ftp (I’m trying to avoid that!) or use media manage (not available when you are editing a page, i.e. when you want to do it) and then cut and paste the link back in to the article you were originally creating. The alternative is to use an extension, but it is reccommend that you only use this if you will be uploading a lot of documents.
• Linking to other pages within the same site is a basic requirement, but even after (a little) looking around, the only option seems to be to navigate to the page in your browser and copy the full URL and paste it in. This seems awkward. If you could select the page yourself from within Joomla, it could update the link if the page moved or uses a different url. I had a page which I only wanted to appear as  link from another page (it wouldn’t make sense on it’s own), but the only way to get the url for the link was to allow it to appear in various menus and sidebars so I could actually navigate to it and then copy the url.
• To help with this I installed my first plugin linkr, which allows you to link to other pages in your site with a simple button, this was simple to install, and works well.

Conclusion

Joomla looks great, and is clearly very powerful. But I find it confusing that what I take as basic functionality is missing or made complex. Response times do seem a little sluggish (only my perception) and I was disapointed by the fairly ugly URLs (something I get irrational animated about).

I shall carry on using it for the time being, I need to give it a good run before making any real judgement, but for me editng webpages (from a web browser) I’m rather tempted to just use another Wordpress installation.