I am new to this, but I am a client, and there is a company doing our website, however i've been researching a lot and joomla's name comes up alot. I was wondering if it was possible to use some of Joomla's features on my website? thanks any suggestions on this subject are welcome.

PS I really like the Mighty message from joomla, so if anyone can recommend something similar to this i will be more than happy. thankyou

You could ask your web designers to build your website on Joomla?

You could ask your web designers to build your website on Joomla?

The website has been made, can you make a new database for the website? with joomla? I want to add things on and joomla has good features

I'm not an expert but generally using a commercial isn't a good idea. Also when asking about whether I should build my own CMS's or use commercial ones, this is an answer I got from an expert.

 

"I doubt it, my company has our own custom CMS that we tailor to our clients, and other companies work that I have seen has always been custom too. Although, if you're charging peanuts you can probably get away with re-branding a Joomla (or similar) install, as long as this is disclosed to the client up front.

 

Like zanus, I wouldn't touch something like Joomla with a barge pole unless we're talking five figures minimum - Its not worth the hassle, frustration and heartache to shoe-horn the required functionality into it. It would be quicker and easier to build from scratch."

 

What are the features you like from Joomla? You could ask the company you're using to implement these features that Joomla uses.

 

Hope this helps,

Josh

for our social networking site, I wanted to implement the "mighty messages" component in, or something similar, its a nice feature that allows users to sort their messages out, send and receive, mark as spam, see sent items etc. the feature i have on my website at the moment is basic, has compose, sent items and inbox, but joomlas is a lot better looking and looks professional thanks for your reply

I'm not an expert but generally using a commercial isn't a good idea.

Where did you get that idea from?

Where did you get that idea from?

 

As I said, I'm not an expert and only going on what I've been told by experienced developers on phpfreaks, whenever I mention using a commercial CMS they say stay away and as I quoted one of those messages, they said they wouldn't touch them with a barge pole unless talking 5 figures minimum.

 

I've never used any of them as I've built everything myself, how customisable can you make them to suit your own designs?

Ah gotcha

 

I'd take it with a pinch of salt though. Some CMS's are generally poor quality but that covers commercial, open source and free.

On the other hand there are many very good quality CMS's that are commercial, open source or free!

 

One of the big problems when recommending software is that a lot of folks simply tell you their personal preferences, and not what is necessarily the best one for you or your site - that takes time to research.

 

I see you mentioned Joomla - it is a decent CMS and you can do a lot with it, but what they never tell you is that it has one of the worst security records of any CMS - so long as you keep it up to date you'd be fine but that's a lot of work you wouldn't necessarily want.

 

Finally, you mentioned someone quoted you a 5 figure sum for working with a commercial CMS - don't forget that you can still pay a similar amount for a site build with no-cost software as well

Edited November 10, 200916 yr by BlueDreamer

Yeah I agree that what you hear is generally what you listen to, and they all agreed at the other place. Here the first opinion is completely different to theirs.

 

As I said I've never used any of them so I don't know anything about any of them as being able to build your own when starting is always best and then you can edit theirs as much as you want as you will know what you're doing. Where as if you go straight to the commercial ones, you have no idea what you're doing and could never build your own. That's my opinion anyway.

 

They obviously didn't like Joomla and when they said a five figure sum I think they generally just meant that it would have to cost a lot for someone to get them to use it as they'd prefer to do a custom one.

As I said I've never used any of them so I don't know anything about any of them as being able to build your own when starting is always best and then you can edit theirs as much as you want as you will know what you're doing. Where as if you go straight to the commercial ones, you have no idea what you're doing and could never build your own. That's my opinion anyway.

 

Yes, every CMS has a learning curve, but open source, free, or commercial doesn't necessarily make one better or easier to work with than the other. I normally use commercial applications for clients sites, ones that I know are good quality and easy for me/my customers to update - but more cruicially I know I have direct developer support should I ever need it (rare!).

 

Choosing the right CMS for you and your site really depends what you want to do with it, whether you can understand the technical aspects for building the site, and if the method of manging content meets your needs. Some CMS's need to to know a smattering of a programming language such as PHP to do anything useful (ie Drupal), others are "plug n play" systems where you don't need much technical knowledge to get started (ie Joomla/Wordpress), and others that let you build fully functional sites with HTML/CSS and a few template tags (ie ModX/Expressionengine).

 

It's a bit like buying a car - you wouldn't buy a Bentley if you wanted to go off-roading

Edited November 10, 200916 yr by BlueDreamer

so in answer to my post, is it possible to change CMS? or is it way to complicated? and if not can someone help me find an alternative to "mighty messages" from joomla thank you

After this I'll probably go and give some of them a go well when I finish my current project that is. So some give you the HTML/CSS as templates but others are fully customisable? Won't the template ones look horrible if everyone has the same/similar looking sites? Generally how much do the non free ones cost on average? Which ones would you recommend to go and mess about with?

 

Ahh sorry Adam, forgot we completely went off subject and didn't answer your question as I've been saying I don't know anything about Joomla but BlueDreamer will probably be able to answer your question.

it's okay, the thing i want is a professional looking feature where users can send messages to each other, the joomla was an example, but it looks nice. the "mighty messages"

so in answer to my post, is it possible to change CMS? or is it way to complicated? and if not can someone help me find an alternative to "mighty messages" from joomla thank you

 

Some CMS offer import/export utilities - though they're not great. If you're a dab hand at PHP/MySQL, you could write a migration script to transfer data between the different schema.

Some CMS offer import/export utilities - though they're not great. If you're a dab hand at PHP/MySQL, you could write a migration script to transfer data between the different schema.

 

and by doing this, nothing on the website will get touched, But i will have a different CMS?

in principle it's possible, yes. Like I said, you'd need to be have some experience with PHP/MySQL.