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Re: [OM] (OT) WordPress Photo Themes

Subject: Re: [OM] (OT) WordPress Photo Themes
From: Ken Norton <ken@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 28 Oct 2011 15:12:36 -0500
Bob, I've been doign some behind-the-scenes web-development for my
site and a couple other sites. I've been giving Wordpress a good
workout and have found it generally a bit lacking. On the plus side,
it's where the majority of people are, so there is some safety in
numbers. It's a decent system, but lacks the high customization
characteristics of a few other CMS.

Zone-10 is built on Mambo, which has since been essentially abandoned.
The joys of the computer age--what is popular one year is defunct the
next. So, once we figure out what to do with the site there will be a
rebuild. I'm looking at three optons: Wordpress, Drupal and Joomla.

Generally speaking, Wordpress is best for a one-lung and serial
operation. What I mean by that is that Wordpress is great when you are
basically the only person maintaining it and adding content. Serial,
because it really is blog oriented and doesn't conform as well to
static content and menu-driven content. Fine as a blog, not so fine as
a resource or sales site. It's not that Wordpress can't be used this
way, but it just is a bit more cumbersome and harder to format in a
non-blog structure.

Joomla is a reworked version of Mambo. All the power is in the
plugins. It's hard not to like Joomla as it interfaces with just about
anything and you can imbed image content, shopping carts and all that
stuff very easily. Once you figure out how the templates work, it's
not too difficult to reformat the design of the site to your own
preference. From a functional and interworking perspective, Joomla is
the best system available. Imbedding content from other sites, even
Flickr, is a piece of cake with Joomla. All this flexibility does come
with a price--it's one of the heaviest systems out there. The software
itself is massive. For a low-traffic site, Joomla is fine, but for
high-volume websites, the way Joomla feeds the page to the browser is
a bear and if the visitor has high-latency connection, it can take a
bit longer to get the page built. Not bad, but not the greatest
either. I had a case, with Mambo (same issue), where I had a popular
article with numerous items on a given page. It literally swamped the
server when 200 concurrent users hit the article. My hosting company
let me know and I quickly broke the article up on multiple pages. If
you plan on serving up a bunch of images at one time on the screen,
this may be problematic--unless you are imbedding Gallery3 for the
image hosting.

Drupal is probably the most interesting of the bunch. Until the latest
version, it was somewhere between Joomla and Wordpress. But now it is
similar to Joomla, minus the obesity. Fast? In my testing, which
mirrors other people's results, it ranges from 2-4 times faster when
you have a lot of elements on the page. It is also built in such a way
that allows far more extendibility with secure applications. If, say,
you want a registration/payment system or an on-line scheduling
system, I'd built it in Drupal. Another aspect of Drupal over Joomla
is the licensing. The Joomla community frowns upon anybody actually
profiting from a module modification. If you make a commercial
application that is based on Joomla modules, technically you are
supposed to keep it open-source. These are the reasons why commercial
establishments are building sites with Drupal more than Joomla. Drupal
"Themes" are available which match the same themes available in Joomla
and some of them in Wordpress.

I have found that there is no one "system" that does it all. Gallery2
and now the recently released Gallery3 do a fantastic job of
image-handling! Gallery2 even has a decent shopping-cart system which
I've used for several years now with great success. But at this point,
we're seeing the greatest movement in imbedded content from other
sites, such as Flickr, Facebook and Google. I believe the day of the
interactive website is drawing down a bit and things are moving
rapidly towards a mix of social media and mobile content. The
iPhone/iPad and Facebook have been gamechangers. Whatever I build next
must be very mobile-friendly.

AG
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