PatchesPal

User Reviews

[3 total ]
about 1 year ago Avatar
Joomla!: I Love Joomla -- My Sites Are Great

  by PatchesPal

During the .com boom of the 90's a CMS with less capabilities than Joomla cost nearly $1 million. Now it's free.

The program is great -- it works. There are hundreds and hundreds of extensions available and they are a piece of cake to install.

There are also hundreds and hundreds of free and commercial templates (Skins) for Joomla.

The community is huge and the forum has answered all of my questions.

One ... [More] fellow complained about slow development. Look at the Joomla site and you will see global cooperative effort to advance the project. The real problem is the development is so fast that the extension providers have a hard time keeping up.

Frank Dwyer [Less]

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about 1 year ago Avatar
MindTouch Core: Refreshing Professionalism in Open-Source

  by PatchesPal

After reviewing as many Wiki offerings as I could I have chosen Deki Wiki.

My community of users would be unwilling to learn to use the editors of the other systems I examined. There may be extensions to fix this but I want to write content not code.

Deki Wiki enables User Generated Content via a wyswhg editor very similar to MS Word. No proprietary markup language.

I host my site on Go Daddy. They install mediawiki ... [More] and pmwiki as part of their hosting offering. So I tried out mediawiki. The lack of documentation and the (how can I be polite about this?) rat's nest of the projects site was so confusing and impenetrable to me as a novice that I went shopping for a better solution. I believe I have found it in Deki Wiki.

I wanted to use it as a seamless extension of my site but opted to use MindTouch's free hosting and provide links back and forth on my site and my Wiki.


The cons so far are:
1. Go Daddy will not allow sufficient control of shared hosting servers to install the program. they would require me to have a virtual private server at the least.

2. The user community forum at forums.opengarden.org is still relatively small. I am used to the huge community of Joomla users and the support available via their forums.

3. No books -- Deki Beginners etc are not yet available. There are a few available (though with poor Amazon reviews) for mediawiki.

4. I do not know how deep the developer community is on this project. It looks to me, after a cursory examination that it is just MindTouch so far.

Frank Dwyer






[Less]

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about 1 year ago Avatar
FireBoard: Sweet but not native 1.5

  by PatchesPal

This seamlessly integrates into Joomla. It is installed with Joomla's easy component install system. Fireboard and Joomla then share the same registration/login system.

Fireboard is compatible with the earlier version of Joomla but it requires Joomla 1.5 to run in 'Legacy Mode." It does not look to me like they are planning to make Fireboard a native 1.5 product as there is a project underway to create a forum offering by ... [More] Joomla.

I like the system it is easy to install, configure and administer. However, the user community forum is relatively small and has not been of much help in the past. It's so simple I have rarely needed support.

Frank Dwyer [Less]

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