How I Became A Joomla Fan... and subsequently gave up on it...
In 2006 I was introduced to a system that I saw single-handedly change my employers ASP website into a manageable site that promised to have each department of the company maintaining there own section. I was amazed at how the new website looked just like the old one but had a much nicer back end and more possibilities. That is why I became a Joomla fan.
Even though Joomla wasn't utilized to its full potential I knew a good thing when I saw it. I downloaded it and installed it on one of my domains. I read the forums, faqs, and joined various communities. It seemed a bit fragmented with different groups scattered all over the web, but I just figured that was a side-effect of being a large community. I was aware of a book that had recently come out and I asked my library to purchase it and they bought 2 copies. I was the 1st to check it out! I started digging into it but found that the author must have been using a different version of Joomla than I was. I was unable to duplicate the exercises in the book and I wasn't getting any responses in the forums when I asked for help. I saw that my employer wasn't doing much with the site and I wondered if it was because of the complicated nature of the system OR the lack of community support. I wasn't sure but I knew one thing, I am a quitter, so I gave up and returned to static site building.
18 months later I was at a new job and where I was tasked with helping a new social network site get launched. Once again, a convoluted, proprietary ASP system was in place and it was lacking to say the least. I suggested that OpenSource was the way to go, and even though my personal experiences with Joomla were less than best, I knew that many excellent sites had been built with more launching everyday.
Long story short... We installed Joomla and and the Community Builder extension. It got us closer to our goals but we needed some serious custom work done on our Joomla site. The vision held by the boss was rather grand and was going require a flexible, customizable system to make it work. I was shopping around for Custom Joomla work and I was even talking to a Joomla core developer who was also working on his own social networking extension for Joomla. It has been a year since I met him and I don't believe it is released to the public yet...
I received a phone call one day from a shop stating that they saw my post asking for Joomla customization. They said that my details were excellent and really spelled out exactly how the site should function. They then said that they don't use Joomla but that they use Drupal. I responded, "Drupal? Is that still around?" While I HAD heard of Drupal before, I honestly thought that it was a deceased cousin to MAMBO or something. The voice on the phone just laughed. Now I do too when I think back.
This is all you get for now... I will add to this story on my next blog-post. Here's a hint... We had 2 shops, one with Joomla and one with Drupal, building a proof of concept for our new site. For free, these two were battling it out to show us how good their CMS was...
To Be Continued.......