Back for another play around with Joomla! and realising that the best test of any software application is how intuitive it is. Having worked (from a pure user point of view) with some content management systems previously, I generally find you can log in and do some things straight away, especially adding articles, sections etc and seeing the results instantaneously.
But not Joomla! – when I try to add a new section or category, for example, I have no idea where or even if this section has actually appeared on the site. Trying to add an article – which I’m guessing is the way to make the section somehow appear as a page – allows me to assign the article to a category but diesn’t actually tell me the URL so that I can check it.
Next, trying to add a menu item gives me a bewildering array of options for ‘menu item type’ such as “wrapper”, “polls” and “separator” – em, I just want a menu item. Why would I want a menu item to appear as a poll? Ridiculous.
So in my view, Joomla! has failed it’s first tests. Miserably. Tomorrow night I’ll start with the idiot’s guide and see if that gets me anywhere.
Hey Ian
We didn’t really get to talk last night in class… how is it going? You sound pretty frustrated. I’ve been following your frustration posts and at the same time unravelling the great open source vs proprietary debate myself. I thought you might like this post http://www.bspcn.com/2008/09/22/15-great-quotes-from-torvalds-and-stallman Some of them are very funny.
Cheers
Angela