Im just wondering why you havent tried joomla 1.5.9 as it is completely different from 1.0.15?
As I mentioned, my biggest complaint with Joomla is with the applications. 1.5.9 doesn’t effect that problem in the least; they are still pretty much all horrible hacks of existing apps to (sort of) work within Joomla. Drupal, on the other hand, has applications that were pretty much all written explicitly for Drupal, and generally by the same set of people to the same coding guidelines.
You have to realize that I don’t need a CMS. We’re not using Joomla or for content management in the usual sense–so comparing the “content management” features of the two packages is nonsensical. They simply don’t matter to me. We’re pretty much using Joomla as a complicated session manager and authentication system…I just want a handful of apps that work seamlessly together.
Virtualmin.com has four major applications right now:
Bug tracker - Flyspray bridged into Joomla (poorly and in ways that are somewhat broken). Drupal has core team managed “Project” and “Project Issue” modules…they aren’t in a core install, but they are used by Drupal.org for issue tracking of all Drupal projects.
Forums - Fireboard, which is a fork of JoomlaBoard which was a fork of something else. Not really bridged, but not very cohesive with Joomla, either. Drupal has a core forums package.
Shopping cart - VirtueMart, which is a fork of some standalone commerce package and bridged into Joomla. Almost like using a completely separate application–very loosely and poorly fitting into Joomla. It works well for the things it does, but customizing it and integrating it further with other components was horrible (it also has practically no hooks for adding code without modifying the core of the component…I had to patch a half dozen files to make our license creation code work, and I gave up before getting upgrades and renewals working). This one is the most like Joomla on Drupal…but Ubercart, at least, has a wide array of hooks, so I don’t have to patch any files within Ubercart in order to build our license issuing code.
Documentation - An ancient version of DokuWiki bridged into Joomla, poorly. This one is actually the least offensive, but it’s still clumsy and upgrading DokuWiki is nightmarish. In this case, I’m actually able to use the content management features of Drupal for this purpose, and it’s working pretty well. The Joomla content management was so painful it made my soul hurt to think of using it for our hundreds of pages worth of documentation–so I punted and went with the wiki. So, again, it’s a well-maintained core feature of Drupal.
So, while Joomla has billions of applications, they are almost universally non-standard and hard to work with. Joomla itself is not particularly bad, but all of the stuff I have to work with isn’t part of Joomla, it’s third party applications. In Drupal, the applications mostly are part of Drupal and they aren’t painful to work with.
We have maybe two dozen pages in the Joomla “content management” system. Everything else is better served by something completely outside of the “content management” concept. So, maybe content management has become wonderful in Joomla (it certainly needed work–I hate working with those two dozen pages, and I can never find what I’m looking for), but the applications are the hard part, and the apps in Joomla just don’t fit the way I need Virtualmin.com to work.
Also, URLs in Joomla 1.5 are still horrible, and any fixes are totally nasty hacks.
Joomla has a lot of cool stuff going for it…but pretty much none of it is right for this site.
Argh…now you’ve got me angry again.
Really, Joomla has served us reasonably well, and we’ve sold a lot of software and supported a lot of customers using it. But, you’ve been around long enough to know about a lot of the problems we’ve had with the issue tracker and the forum in particular. The shopping cart issues have been better hidden and you would have only had a handful of opportunities to see them, but they’re equally annoying to me. It’s (almost) time to move on to something else. (Where I’m sure I’ll also have lots of complaints after it goes live, and at some point I’ll to have to find the budget to hire a PHP/Drupal guru to correct them.)