Joomla! 1.6 – a review from a nerd
This review is subjective, it is intended to be such and is my perception of what is going on with the CMS… or the framework.
What Joomla! 1.6 brings in fact?
- ACL – from developer point of view it is quite powerful, but the lack of consistent administrative views to manage it and let us say it… very high learning curve
for web administrators (not developers), will simply ruin the image of the
Joomla! backend being simple.
- Nested categories – Not a real solution, as it says it all, it is only nested categories. A category cannot have two parents, neither an article. This is
kind of interim solution, that simply does not fit most of the needs in 2010.
- Automatic update – well, not that automatic, nothing close to WordPress in comparison. It is an again a huge difference from the expectations.
What is not in?
- Comments – No comments, in fact Joomla! continues to be the only top CMS with no built-in comment system. For years.
- Multilangualization – It appears that there is something, but from my experience it will bring more confusion rather than being used.
- Load – It is very slow, in comparison to competing CMSs, it simply does it slow. Probably the huge amounts of images used in the backend also have negative impact.
- Inconsistent look – The backend is obviously inconsistent and Emir pointed out some of the important issues.
- No ping, no trackback, no social sharing – This version would be perfect if it was realized in 2005.
- From developer point of view, it is very clear that the creators are undecided if they want to develop a CMS or framework only.
My personal opinion: Skip 1.6 and go for 1.7. This way you may skip the expected fail.
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Comment by Ivo Apostolov on May 17, 2010 at 5:43pm -
My direct help will not be accepted, that is another story. However I will make my own ways to contribute back, that is for sure.
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Comment by Amy Stephen on May 17, 2010 at 9:29pm
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Ivo -
I'm sorry to say this, but I've read this a few times, and I gotta tell you, there really isn't any substance to this.
"It is very slow" says nothing. What testing did you use? What did you compare too?
Same with "Inconsistent look" - inconsistent with what?
J! is both a CMS and a framework, so, I am very confused on that last sentence.
Why should ping, trackbacks, and social sharing be in core? Especially trackbacks when there is no comments?
What are the multi-lingual additions for 1.6? "appears that there is something, " tells me you heard about something but didn't see it. Is that what you mean? If so, on what do you base your opinion that it will be more confusing? And, more confusing than what? Joomfish? (Since I know you work with that.)
Seems like maybe you had a bad day and took it out on 1.6 Beta?
I hereby challenge you to do a real evaluation. Here's a good resource entitled Learn to Give Excellent Feedback. Read through that, Ivo, and see if you can provide analysis that could be helpful, or at least interesting. Gotta cover your bases, show benefits, along with areas of improvement. Make certain to encourage those for whom you are directing your comments.
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Comment by Marius van Rijnsoever on May 18, 2010 at 12:18am -
It is a big issue that after 2.5 years of development there aren't many exciting features for regular joomla user to entice people to switch. Multiple reports of Joomla 1.6 being slower will mean the PR company hired by OSM will need to work overtime. It sounds like the framework has greatly improved, but that will not get too many users excited.
No comments is also an issue, as it had been promised (and greatly promoted) to be one of the major Joomla 1.6 improvements.
Joomla 1.6 is now "locked" for new features so there is not much to do about the issues you raised except the load and consistency issues. I'll be helping out with some of the coding style issues, but it is going to be hard to "fix" most issues raised in this blog.
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Comment by Ivo Apostolov on May 18, 2010 at 1:44am
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Amy, I didn't want to prepare a full analysis, but a simple review based on the short look after release. That is why it is titled that way.
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Comment by Marius van Rijnsoever on May 18, 2010 at 2:24am
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Amy there are a couple of discussions on the Joomla Bug Squad list that discuss the slower loading times of Joomla 1.6 . Also on the dev group it has been discussed:
http://groups.google.com/group/joomla-dev-cms/browse_thread/thread/...
Joomla 1.5: Application Stop: 3.830 seconds, 1.36 MB
Joomla 1.6: Application Stop 6.846 seconds,; 2.44 Mb
They are working on a solution. Thanks, Marius
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I posted a link to a list of changes Andrew shared on the Bug squad link. Let's remember that it always takes a bit to get to know a new release and understand the improvements made.
I am aware of Klas's testing. Performance will be a focus now that they have reached beta.
I realize comments were not included and for me, that is disappointing. I have not had time to really examine the release in depth so Andrew's document will be helpful to me, too, especially to get involved with the Bug Squad finalizing the release.
I helped finalize 1.5, as well, and there was a lot of similar comments made about the lack of user improvements for that release. Given the fact 3rd party contributions are so important, knowing the focus continues to be the framework is encouraging.
After such a long haul, reaching beta is such an important milestone for a development team. From this point forward, we are looking at two-week beta cycles. The more specific and actionable our feedback, the more likely we can help improve the release.
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Ivo - you've been blogging with us since we started, why the moderated comments? :-P
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Comment by Ivo Apostolov on May 18, 2010 at 5:21am
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It was not intentionally, I was playing with the settings yesterday.
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Comment by Ivo Apostolov on May 18, 2010 at 5:27am
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Efforts on the framework are great, but this really makes the new features to come very slowly.
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New features should primarily come from extensions, not core. Would love to see us lose a lot of what's there and move towards a rich framework and distribution environment.
Anyway, take time to look closely at the list. If you have time to try to figure out the new language capabilities (I have no clue what that is), blogging on how to use that would be very helpful. Then, when people can see what is available, specific ideas on improvements could be helpful. I know that's an area of expertise for you so I would be very interested in reading that post if you wrote it.
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