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Oh no! Joomla uses tables!

eclipse

eclipse

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Nov 18, 2005
989
14
Sydney
I've just been doing the Lynda.com stuff on XHTML and CSS, and got all excited because I'm starting to play with Joomla. Then, to my horror I viewed the source code on a page I had generated. Without my knowledge (or permission!) it had generated all these ugly tables!

So.... if a client wants CMS, I guess Joomla is the easiest, but their website performance may be compromised a bit because of tables? Is tables really that big a deal?
 
Joomla is the easiest to get started but you will pay for it in the long run.

I used Joomla for a long time but finally switched to Drupal because Joomla's formatting got on my last nerve.

If you are doing a blog, use WordPress, otherwise use Drupal.
 
eclipse said:
By "formatting" do you mean its code formatting?
Click to expand...

No, but that sucked too.

I mean when I created a "post" that the formatting in the editor never matched what ended up being published, and more I messed with the post, the worst it got. I normally ended up creating the posts in another program and copying them over.
 
Oh. The WYSIWYG behaves badly hey? They've got new WYSIWYG plug ins and even the core is getting an upgrade soon.

That's the main problem... both keep upgrading. While your experience might be perfectly valid, both are evolving so fast. Joomla 1.6 is out any week soon, and I hear Drupal 7 is out soon? (And it's a major re-write, trying to be a bit more "Joomla" friendly looking in the back-end control panel, with graphics etc).

With Joomla, I only need to know HTML and CSS. But with Drupal, don't I also need to know a bunch of other stuff like php etc?
 
But that does not tell me why.

Also, check this google trends graph.

http://www.google.com/trends?q=Drupal,Joomla

viz


If Joomla is missing some item, surely with a trend like that it's going to get it soon.
 
eclipse said:
So.... if a client wants CMS, I guess Joomla is the easiest, but their website performance may be compromised a bit because of tables? Is tables really that big a deal?
Click to expand...

To answer your first question. I don't think performance will be impacted to any noticeable level.

eclipse said:
Also, check this google trends graph.

http://www.google.com/trends?q=Drupal,Joomla
Click to expand...

Joomla is easier to start and takes very no programming knowledge to use. So more people are going to use it. If you have no interest in learning php then Joomla probably will be best for you.
 
That graph is slightly misleading...add mambo and you get a more accurate picture.. ;)

viz
 
I just found out that many new templates and themes for Joomla are becoming tableless and CSS standards compliant. As I said, Joomla is evolving fast.
 
eclipse said:
I just found out that many new templates and themes for Joomla are becoming tableless and CSS standards compliant. As I said, Joomla is evolving fast.
Click to expand...

Good, you will probably enjoy Joomla, but I am sticking with drupal...
 
I've messed with drupal, mambo, and joomla many times, while drupal is good, mambo and joomla allow a LOT more flexibility.

I mean a LOT more, it's not even funny. The problem with flexibility however, is you can spend months making things exactly how you want them - but it's possible. That, and the backend is kinda goofy XD

Drupal is nice though, looks better to begin with, Mambo has a lot more potential.
 
Joomla 1.6 is nearly out and is evolving, fast.

there are now auto-updater alert plugins, probably going core soon...

...there's a project called http://jfusion.org/ that lets us put a bulletin board inside a Joomla wrap, share user databases, and provide a unified look and header to both your joomla blog/website pages and the forum....

...there's thousands upon thousands of new extensions...

..."The joomla podcast" in iTunes....

...more video tutorials at Lynda.com coming...

...lots seems to be happening and I'm just new to the Joomla world!
 
 
Because of all the new plugins, anything older than 6 months is irrelevant. As someone on a D V J thread said somewhere,

"It's like comparing buying a 2006 Toyota V a 2007 Jeep in a 2008 market."

Some of the new Joomla templates are tableless, for example, and allow more flexible CSS. There are ways around some of the older "limitations" being criticised here.

And 1.6 is out soon. Both Drupal and Joomla are evolving, and because of the sheer time involved in getting to know both really well, it is hard to get up to date comparisons between the 2, and the time involved makes it very hard to get OBJECTIVE up to date comparisons. Once someone makes a decision for one or the other it's sometimes some ineffable forum community contact or subjective user experience that "clicks" better with that person.


Also, everyone always says Drupal is better for building communities but check this out. Joomla now quite thoroughly integrates phpbb3 or Vbulletin or others through the Rockbridge or Jfusion packages.

Well you can try new Jfusion 1.1.0 http://www.jfusion.org/ now and also use it with fullymoddedphpBB "Extreme with Board3 Version 2 Release" http://www.fullymoddedphpbb.com/viewtopic.php?f=68&t=354 with ROK templates (inheritance override). That can not Drupal do :D

Thats power isnt it?
Click to expand...
 
I used Joomla until just about a week ago when I got fed up with it.

Joomla looks great, acts great, and is great.... until you spend enough time with it. As said above, Joomla formating (WYSIWYG-wise) is horrible. I used a different editor (the most popular one, JCE), it is slightly better, but is still horrible. I am often getting calls now, with clients trying to get the formatting to work. It takes me going to the code and cleaning it to get it to work.

Joomla outputs tables, which although I am anti-tables, I could deal with.

So, I got tired of it, and switched to Drupal. It takes slightly more work to create the templates (as in 10~15 minutes extra work) and the PHP you need to know to get what Joomla offers you through their tags (adding content to the page for instance) is not much, and is well documented in tutorials.

You need to make an info page for each drupal template (similar to Joomla), but after that, you can just use the following for the Drupal-equivilant of a module (mine is called header):
PHP: 
<?php print $header; ?>

And this to add the content area:
PHP: 
<?php print $content; ?>

It really isn't that massive of a learning curve. It takes a few hours to get used to it, then it is nice. So far I have had no issues with Drupal, but, as said above, I've only been using it for a week.

When the clients get ahold of it, I recommend using the permissions system in Drupal to limit what they see to only what they need, which makes it much less overwhelming.

You have to install the WYSIWYG editor yourself (I chose tinyMCE), but it is fairly simple (10~15 minutes of work with their instructions).

If you choose to use Drupal, go here for the WYSIWYG editor. It is the one I used... Also, be sure to read their "how to build templates" tutorial. It is pretty good, though sometimes confusing, and it does explain the whole template building process.

Also, Drupal is FAR more flexible than Joomla, providing that you know PHP. If not, then I would say that it is close, but slightly-less flexible than Joomla.

I hope that helps.
If you have any questions, just ask.
MegaMan1311
 
That's all well and good but I'm still at the level of learning XHTML and CSS. How do you think I feel about Drupal if I also have to know PHP?

Also, Jfusion.org — is there an equivalent phpbb "wrap" for Drupal?
 
I understand what you mean, it is hard enough learning two at a time, let alone three with a language like PHP being one of them. So, maybe Joomla is your best bet.

Here is a tip if you go the Joomla path. If you copying content from an old website to a new one, I HIGHLY recommend pasting it in a good text editor (Word, Pages, even Textedit) and format it there before pasting it to your site. Often, it seems like the code from the old site will also be copied and will mess up your site if you do not. Also, I would do the same for making new content. The WYSIWYG editors in Joomla just do not work well...

I'm not aware of a phpBB "wrap" for Drupal. There are addons where you can integrate the logins sessions and the users, but to get a "wrap" effect, you would have to build two separate templates, but make them look like they are the same site AND use those addons...

Again, if you have any questions, just ask.
MegaMan1311
 
The Lynda.com tutorials I'm doing on Joomla template moderation use Firefox's "Web Developer". I've seen other people doing tutorials with FF's "Firebug".

Because I'm such a newbie and I'm drowning just in Joomla (let alone Drupal) I feel for Drupal newbies, so there's a few resources I should share.

There's free Vodcasts in iTunes
"Art of Code" is excellent for CSS basics!
"Mustardseed media" that goes over web design basics, CSS, and sometimes refers to using Drupal.
CSS-Tricks Screencasts
CSS Tips and Tricks
Drupal videos

There's also this Drupal podcast
http://www.lullabot.com/podcast


Just sharing the open source, open information love around. :D
 
What I miss in Joomla compared to Drupal is taxonomy, unlimited hierarchies and node system making it better for many to many relations. Also that they start up with thinking with rules having their own rules project addon.

Joomla have rules for modules Meta Mod http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/access-&-security/group-access/3391/details and also a subcategories project where you can have indefinite of subcategories. http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=231&t=298117&start=60

About performance I dont think thats an issue with J 1.5 native, you can use the latest QueryCache from Antony Ferrara http://www.joomlaperformance.com and have some really nice speed improvments of Joomla.

I dont have any problems using JCE or different FCK etc editors for Joomla really.

Here you have some more nice prod for one of Joomlas core dev too http://jxtended.com/products.html

Try both and you will see but for me Joomla is winner of design bcs sofar I have never seen o n e nice designed Drupal site. Can you show me one?

rgds
 
ssnobben said:
What I miss in Joomla compared to Drupal is taxonomy, unlimited hierarchies and node system making it better for many to many relations. Also that they start up with thinking with rules having their own rules project addon.
Click to expand...
Agreed. Maybe I'm mixing my metaphors to the point of absurdity comparing the following 2, but I see an analogy between Phpbb3's old forum structure and Joomla's article structure.

It seems Phpbb3 used to have a forum "Sections" and "Forums" forum setup categories, but now they've just got forum "parents" and sub-forums to those parents.... all the way down. Not that I can imagine a forum going "in" more than 2 levels, but it depends on the users hey?

So yes, when it comes to labelling types of discussions into "Sections" and "Categories" only, and so much of the menu architecture seems to be guided by these labels (from my newbie POV at least, I could be wrong), then I'm struggling to understand why they don't just have a similar hierarchy to phpbb3 (but in article categories, not forums of course).
 
My 2 Cents

OK. I thought I would put my two cents in. I first started with Joomla then decided Joomla did more than I needed. I then moved to WordPress and after awhile began to need WordPress to do more. I gave Drupal a try and found it a little different than the other two but way more flexible and better organized.

I recently picked up a side job that involved Joomla. I use to be obsessed with Joomla in the beginning. Now going back to Joomla I miss Drupal. If you need to create any module or component override templates, get ready to sort through a lot of php. Since I'm a web designer I hate tables. I've created a custom theme with custom layouts for page elements, now I've discovered I have to create 10 to 20 override template files to get the layout I want. This wouldn't happen with Drupal. All of Drupal's modules consume the core and tie into the other modules. It seems like all of Joomla's exist independent from one another making it even harder to manage.

WordPress - for simple sites and blogs. Don't even try to make it do more. You'll be sorry.
Joomla - for people that don't want to customize a thing, use Free everything. Just modify templates that exist. Just install modules that already exist. Definitely for the beginner and someone that doesn't know any better.
Drupal - for more complicated sites and social networks. For those that want control over look and feel without having to modify every dang modules or components templates. Drupal is definitely more attractive the those that know better.

That is my two cents. The only thing I wish Drupal had was a default admin control panel like Joomla. That is the only thing I miss about Joomla. But there are modules in Drupal that will somewhat do that.

Take it or leave it.
 
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