Hi, I am a Software Developer turned Web Developer. I have gotten my head around W3 and design standards. I understand the necessity for care in developing web based systems and the popular problems that arise and "hacks" that are often necessary to get things "working", cross browsers etc.

I have just installed Joomla 1.5 and am playing around with it. My problem (which I know is a lack in understand) is that I cannot see how these CMS systems are useful outside the scope of providing a user with a nice way to maintain a traditionally static website. For example if I had a personal site (which I don't yet), I could have typically divided the site up in to the following pages {Home, About Me, Contact}, very basic I know, but hypothetically it's fine.

Now the content on these pages, generally wouldn't be dynamic in nature and not require a database or server side logic to generate the pages, they could just be delivered as is. Now if I wanted a mechanism to simply edit those pages, without having to engage in the whole (download/edit/upload) markup cycle, I could employ a system like Joomla.

Now consider this. I have a site which will reflect a stock inventory, which is essentially contained in a database. So for example if I had PHP page called showItem.php, I could simply pass it an "id" (or whatever) which would then pull content from the database and generate XHTML markup and in conjunction with some style sheet, present the stock item information in any way I see fit. Now my point here is that there is simply one page to achieve this. I'm just talking about presenting to the user, nothing to do with the interface as top how the item got in to the database in the first place. From my understanding with Joomla is that the admin needs to go and create something seperate for each thing they want available on the site. As opposed to the CMS logic being able to see that there are 500 items in the database and by using the same document, display them based on the id being passed by the site visitor.

This is really bothering me because, I know I am missing something significant here and am waiting for this whole thing to make sense. Or am I right, we're really trying to mash our own websites in to an open source management solution that has tried it's best foresee (in an abstract way) what our content will be like, while at the same time giving us limited and a hacky approach to introduce our presentation layer.

In terms of a Model View Controler architecture, I always saw a CMS as a Controller, where the site template (style sheets, etc) were the View, and whatever relevant data was in the database was the Model. However with the likes of Joomla, Drupal, etc, it seems that they have crossed the boundary in to all 3 domains, and subsequently made it more of a challenge for us to implement them across the board.

What am I missing here?

In a system like Joomla!, the "components", "modules" or "plugins" would be equivalent to a view in MVC, templates/stylesheets just organise that output and help make it look "pretty".

For a "shop" in joomla you would add a component like VirtueMart or something similiar.

Joomla! out of the box essentially just allows you to write pages/articles and to hang them off menus with the end result being a website.

The beauty of a CMS is that you really don't need to know HTML, Javascript etc you just need to worry about the important part of the website.... the content.

Thank you for your reply. When you say components play a role towards implementing Joomla in more complex systems, are there any good ones available which would facilitate a brochure or catalog based site?. Where the site admin, could simply create a catalog of searchable items which could be presented according to a custom style sheet.

Thanks again

Depends on what you want to do. If a standalone shopping cart site is what you want the have a look at something like osCommerce, Open Source Online Shop E-Commerce Solutions. If you want to combine Jooomla! and a shopping cart then look at Joomla extensions like Joomla! Extensions Directory - VirtueMart there are other options, Drupal has ecommerce modules at Modules: e-Commerce | drupal.org

There is so much choice out there it is hard to be general and pick something, you'll find other contributers here have their preferences that suit their particular needs. It is best to research the options, then download and play with them and see which ones suit your needs.

The downside to 3rd party modules, however, is that they may not be updated as quickly as the core, so if you keep the core CMS up to date you may end up with incompatible modules / components.

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I've always felt that I wanted to write my own system to manage my blog or whatever. And I did for a while. I coded a pretty decent job that gave me everything that I needed. However, with work and various other stuff catching up quickly I decided that I couldn't really afford the time to keep it secure, and keep innovating, etc. even though the ability to tell folks that it was my own creation was something of a pleasure. Of course the main pleasure was knowing that I did something pretty unique and was able to play around with the code as much as I wanted as I knew it pretty well!

So for my newest site and redesign, I've gone "backwards" and am using wordpress. For many reasons, see above, but mainly out of laziness. There is a huge community of developers with more time than me to be worrying about security and everything else, and I've found that its well able to suit my meager needs. More than able in fact!

Of course, any spare minute I get, I've starting changing bits of the code here and there... changing anything that didn't suit me. So again it starts... Us code monkeys don't really need to sleep anyway....

i think you may have a valid point depending on the end solution you are after - i mean if you have a specific task in terms of taking stuff from a DB and displaying it on a page then its probably easier to code it with php or something - i had a cms that i wrote in php but i never bothered to do a backend to it and just put stuff in DB with phpmyadmin ..... but you cant expect joe the website owner to do things that way ... but for me joomla is as much about the backend as the front end in that once you get the thing setup it's really easy to add data to ( for everybody non-techies included) ..... but also as said already it really is just a way to organise content until you start to add extensions - and you could probably get an extension to do the type of task you referred to earlier - BTW the joomla website has an extensions section and there really is one for anything you want - in fact as a software guy you might even want to develop some - there is great scope for adding community sections, galleries, shops, blogs etc ..... of course you could develop your own bespoke CMS either

about your catalog question - it seems that virtuemart is the main choice for joomla - i have used it and i think it's fine except for 2 things .... it is pretty hard to do a seemless integration.... that is it works fine out of the box but it doesnt display that well and while this may be ok for a cheapy secondhand engine parts shop it might not work for a top notch designer shoes site and to be honest i found this aspect a bit tedious - but when you get the hang of it ( the hacks and all the settings that is ) it is not too bad - other thing ( and i'm only checking this out at the moment so there might be an easy solution ) is that it doesnt seem to be too worried about the w3c stuff --- ........ and another thing ....if you are using it as an online shop there is no "an post" shipping module available that i am aware of.

btw you can use virtuemart either in product catalog or online shop mode

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You might find VirtueMart a slight case of overkill if its simply a catalog you want... a possible alternative is Joomla! Extensions Directory - AdsManager: Classified Ads . Its a very versatile component and is very easily tweaked. Has worked well for me in the past as a simple catalog.

Having said that if you wish to convert to a shop in the future your better off starting with virtuemart from the beginning. But as byronyasgur states.. no 'an post'