Hi everyone,
I've been a Joomla user for several years and have been relatively happy with it, but am now looking to expand what I'm doing with my site and change a few things. I realize I should probably just install MT and test drive it, but I'd like your thoughts on the feasibility of designing and maintaining this kind of site over time.
What I currently do isn't blogging. My site: - static front page with some intro content/images, PHP includes, script to place a PHPList subscription form, a random banner (70 of my photos formatted as site banners), top and bottom menu and footer with some links to static pages - photo gallery powered by Gallery2 and bridged into Joomla - section of travel writing, originally done in bloging format, but many before blog times. A single aggregate story from a trip may have several entries (AKA a post every few days) or a single long entry. Some stories are big (30k+ words), spanning 10 large pages (with suckerfish table of contents menus). Photos in the stories are thumbnails linking to Gallery2 pages, placed by a TinyMCE addon that lets me insert directly from my Gallery2 content. There's also lots of CSS formatting that lends a newspaper/magazine style to it. Stories also have a PHP include that attaches an AddThis sharing button. - extras page of various things I want to share (a blog-style list of a dozen individual items) - customized contact form
Where MT comes in is that I'd like to expand my site to include a photoblog of my most recent work. I'm not particularly interested in the comment features of a blog, but I could take it and possibly shut it off. I don't really want comments on the stories though, but I could live with it.
Problems/hurdles: For the most part, everything is working and I'm reluctant to change for change's sake. But Joomla isn't playing nice with large content items and I don't want to split up articles into several parts. Further, Joomla's SEF addons don't allow SEF generation for my Gallery2 content, and I've seen at least one MT/G2 site where it's working.
I've spent a ton of time making my own code changes and highly customized Joomla and Gallery2 templates, which I'd like to keep (generally), but I don't see the kind of template options (maybe I'm looking in the wrong places?) that are available for Joomla/Wordpress and the like.
So, what to do? I'm not really after a blogging site, just a site that happens to have a blog. Is MT the platform to use? Are MTs benefits worth the time investment to learn/convert/customize, or should I stick with Joomla?
I'm eager to hear your thoughts. Thanks very much for reading.
Matt
Hi Matt,
I noticed you are another Joomla user (other than myself) that discovered Movable Type. I would be interested to hear more about your site concept but overall, I can say that MT can be used as a full cms based website and function well enough to give you most of what you may want. There is more manual based html work to do with this cms compared to Joomla, and once you get comfortable with how MT works, you will find it a reasonable choice. However, there is still a lot of benefits in using Joomla because of it's module features and functions as well the extensions for commercial level extensions gives it the overall advantage. But remember that Joomla was designed for this, whereas MT is more of a blogging platform for business. However, MT is developing very well and I have to admit I am very impressed. So impressed that I am in the process of converting my Joomla design site over to MT and to be honest, from the front-end, you cannot tell the difference until you look at the code. Combining both platforms in one domain site maybe extra work for you but my guess is that you may need to choose one or the other. There is definitely a learning curve to use MT as a full cms and to simulate Joomla, but to be honest, not every site should use Joomla, likewise, not every site should use MT. Confused you more here I am sure but if you want to go further into discussion, perhaps its a case to review your site more in depth and to determine which is ultimately the better platform.