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?
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?
