Anyone use Joomla?

[IDOL]

I've had a few clients ask for the ability to be able to edit their sites themselves after I create them, and with Dreamweaver it's really not possible if the person doesn't know the coding languages. Other than the Incontext editing feature that allows the client to edit certain preset parts of the page, there isn't much I can do.

So I was informed that I should probably learn to use Joomla, and give my clients a brief training with it once I develop the websites. Now, trying to teach myself this over tutorials has been mind numbingly difficult. I know that great sites can be developed using Joomla (like TNAwrestling.com) so I really do want to learn it. Can anyone recommend any good tutorials, both video and print?

Also, to those that know coding, how hard is it to actually develop themes for Joomla sites? Is it mostly CSS? Thanks for any help.

[LUKIE]

The big CMS at the moment is wordpress. It is generally easy to implement and easy to learn.

Pretty much the entire web industry in Australia has moved from joomla etc. to wordpress.

EDIT:

http://www.wordpressvsjoomla.com/

That might help.

Basically, if I was going to continue in the web industry (which I'm not), I would have worked out how to implement flash and wordpress. Which probably makes no sense. If I do end up making my site, I'm going to learn wordpress.

Wordpress is a dream for front end designers, like you and I. You don't need to know heaps of coding to make it work, because the skinning process is easy. JOOMLA is alot more for backend coding. You can probably do a lot more with JOOMLA in regards to setting up web carts etc.

[IDOL]

After struggling with Joomla for three days and still being unable to install it to anything but my localhost, I have decided to give wordpress a try instead. It installed quickly and without any problems. It's looking better already.

[LUKIE]

(Y)

Glad to hear.

Let me know how it goes, because then you can give me a crash course in it

[LUKIE]

Checked out a bunch of tutorials on wordpress. It looks like it's easy as shit.

Since you know CSS, you shouldn't have any problems.

But one cool thing I found, to get rid of the blog data, so when you update posts, or make posts etc. it doesn't say you made the post and the comments part, just delete this from the index.php:

■<?php the_time(‘F jS, Y’) ?><?php edit_post_link(‘, Edit’); ?>

■<div class=”comm”><?php comments_popup_link(‘Post Comment’, ‘Comments (1)’, ‘Comments (%)’); ?></div>

I'm going to convert the PBAWA website to wordpress, and make it super epic (Y)

[IDOL]

Yeah Wordpress looks like it is really easy to skin for. I'm checking out a bunch of the plugins right now. Looking for something similar to Front Page Slideshow, but free.

[LUKIE]

Something like this?

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/frontpage-slideshow/