Ben Allfree :: Painless Programming

I’ve been talking with more clients lately about Joomla. The Content Management System (CMS) is not dead, oh no, not dead at all. I’m not sure how PHP’s Joomla compares with a CMS like DotNetNuke, but my suspicion is that Joomla is far more widely used and probably has more modules and plugins too simply because the whole thing is open source.

Joomla may not be as slick as Ruby on Rails, but that’s only if you want to roll your own site. If you want to start with some kind of basic plumbing completed, I think you would be wise to look at WordPress or Joomla before you even considered something like Mephisto even though it is slick and Rails-like.

There is still room for custom web site design, of course. But you have to consider what you’re really gaining. Is re-solving a problem a better way worth it? Or might it be as effective to just use the old solution that may be clumsier but in a way that you don’t need to care about.

Do you care that today’s cement dries harder and faster than 50 years ago? In some cases you might. But guess what, there are a lot of 50-year-old buildings still standing. As far as I know, the only people complaining about cement quality are the ones who need to fix it when it breaks. I’m all for better quality materials and construction, but should we really dismiss a working stable solution just because technology continues to inch forward?