I've got some project work coming up involving Joomla. I've never used it (or indeed any of these new fangled web CMSes) so I thought I'd play with it.
Many's a contractor would save this for Monday and charge for the initial learning too, but in this case it seemed like a fun thing to do and more importantly I want to be able to discuss the requirements with the client with something of an idea what I'm talking about and some chance of being able to predict how long the work will take.
Joomla seems quite flexible and produces pleasing and consistent results very easily, but it's also seems quite cumbersome to use compared with raw HTML. Making a page (menu item) seems like a lot of effort compared with what I'm used to. Then again, if you really are after the bloggy, latest-articles-first sort of auto-layout, it's largely a one off operation. If you want more fine grained control over which articles are linked where, that seems to be fighting it a little more.
The extension API seems fairly straightforward though the terminology and structure is a little counter-intuitive to me and the tutorials and howtos I found seemed heavy on "Do this and you'll see this result," approach. I prefer: "Do this and Joomla will do this, then this, and this to give you this result." If you want to code something very similar to the example that's one thing, but if you need to do something a little bit different from what's out there you need to know the hows and whys, not just the what-do-i-copies.
All in all though, fun stuff. I should probably look at Drupal at some point too for a different perspective, but not until this project is done and dusted.
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