Assignment 3

I contacted the Greenville County Library System (GCLS) in South Carolina about their Joomla website, and they put me in touch with their Web Developer, Brian Dykes.  He has been working for GCLS for two years, and their website has been running on Joomla for three years.  Brian has more than a decade’s worth of experience designing for websites, both commercial and non-profit.  He kindly answered my interview questions by email:

How and where did you hear about Content Management Systems and Joomla?

In all honesty, I was a hardcore custom coder before coming to the GCLS.  I had never even heard of Joomla in 2010 when I was interviewed for the position I now hold.  I was only vaguely familiar with CMSs.

What were your motivations to adopt Joomla for your library website?

From my understanding, the GCLS chose Joomla for because the Web Developer at the time was somewhat familiar with it.  Also, it being linux-based, open source (read: Free) and widely used (free support) were other attractive features that led to our selecting it.  My guess is that the other two (Drupal & Wordpress) were either too technical and/or not fully functional to fit our needs at the time.

What were your decision making criteria?

See 2^nd answer above.

What are the important benefits or advantages of Joomla over your previous website? Did you use a different CMS in the past or was it strictly html?

Before using Joomla, our site was created/maintained using HTML & Javascript.  Advantages with Joomla (any CMS) would be ease of maintenance, automated scheduling of events/programs (start/stop publish times), and even though we don’t use the feature, the ability to allow non-technical staffers to post information pertinent to their positions and/or units.

How was the learning curve?

There was a slight learning curve with Joomla.  I’d say it took me about a week to change my mindset to “understand” how (why?) Joomla was the way it is. IMO, Joomla tends to make some fairly sophisticated tasks very easy to implement.  By that same token, it often takes something fairly simple and makes it more difficult than it needs to be.  My suspicion is that anyone coding websites nowadays wouldn’t have too much trouble.

Which extensions/plugins were most useful for creating content for your library?

Current version of website relies on Mosets Tree plugin (for databases), mod_swfobject (for Flash), DJ ImageSlider (new additions widget) and DOCman for housing/organizing our online publications (FOIA & BOT stuff, job postings, policies etc.)

Did you create a custom template or adapt an existing template?

The previous Web Developer created a very basic, somewhat fragile and limited template that we’ve been using for the past few years.  Although I’ve “enhanced” it a bunch, it still leaves a lot to be desired. That being said, we are currently redesigning our site and have purchased a nice looking, fully-featured template that should help us along quite a bit.  We dabbled with the idea of creating one from scratch but for less than $70, this approach seemed hard to beat.  So far, so good.

What is the best advice you can give a library just getting started with Joomla?

KEEP IT SIMPLE.  At least at first.  Only use tried & true extensions/mods that have been out for a loooooong time with hundreds of users in real settings.  Make sure in addition to having someone well-versed in HTML/Javascript/PHP as the developer, that you have someone very knowledgeable at the server level that can help with those types of things.  Without our network administrators, I’d be in rough shape.

Reflection

Brian Dykes’ answers mostly followed my own experience, especially his comment that “Joomla tends to make some fairly sophisticated tasks very easy to implement.  By that same token, it often takes something fairly simple and makes it more difficult than it needs to be.”  I also related to having to change your mindset when you come from a traditional web design background.  The advantages of Joomla are in creating complicated information interfaces such as the Moset’s Tree plugin for databases (I’ve used Sobipro which is a competitor to Moset’s Tree), but sometimes there are things that you could so easily code in HTML that become difficult when trying to recreate them in Joomla (such as only showing particular parts of a menu). 

I was surprised by his answer that his system is choosing to purchase a template.  The price is certainly reasonable, but my own experience with templates was not being able to find one that fit our library, especially since we needed different looks for different departments such as the Children’s Area and Teen Scene.  I have put many hours into learning how Joomla templates work, learning enough PHP to get by, and creating graphics, that I know my system’s redesign would have been finished much sooner if we used an off the shelf template. I also know what he means by “fragile.”  I would have a template exactly how I wanted it only to find one little module would throw everything off, and I’d have to make more custom classes.  

I know that in this class, our exercise in creating a Joomla site was supposed to show how easy it is for a non-coder to make a site, but I think Brian is right.  While Joomla allows non-coders to update their sections and participate in creating web content, the person who manages the site should be “well-versed in HTML/Javascript/PHP.”  I can’t image setting up some of the plug-ins I’ve added to our site without knowing some PHP.  Everything has to be tweaked to work together.  I think that even as systems like Joomla become more widely adopted, library systems will still need web developers on staff.