Nearsoft has a generally positive post about a Joomla deployment. However, there are notes of hidden traps:
- The HTML it generates is not the cleanest and leanest it could be (but I believe that they’re working on that). This may be an issue if you follow W3C standards (and you should or else @mollydotcom will get you).
- The variety of HTML generated by components and modules makes Joomla! difficult to syle with CSS. You need to have experience with HTML and CSS to achieve exactly the look you want, consistently through the site.
- We tried not to, but in the end I had to dig in with PHP and make some modifications to components and/or modules to generate different markup.
- Independent packages are maintained by folks not related to the Joomla! core team and they can conflict with each other. Troubleshooting this kind of problems can be time consuming.
These casual asides should be a red-flag for anyone lulled into complacency about how easy it will be to roll out a Joomla‘s website. As with many software packages technical help is mandatory!
Some questions posted back to the Nearsoft folks:
- So how long was the deployment?
- How many technical man-hours?
- How long was the total project duration?
- How much effort was demanded of the client in terms of decision-making and training?
- What were the key business drivers behind the choice of Joomla?
- How much technical expertise was required? ( Joomla-specific? PHP-specific? or just “techie-type” knowledge? )
- How hard was it to debug configuration issues? ( amount of time)
- What was the impact of module conflicts?
- How hard was discovering module conflicts and which modules were the problematic ones? ( was logging clear? )
- How hard was rolling back to a previous known good state?
- How much does Joomla protect the user from a rollout that will result in data corruption?
- What kind of automatic test infrastructure does Joomla have in place that verifies that the site is functional?