All together now, almost.
What I really like about Joomla! is the size of the user community, I’m in awe of how far they’ve come in just 2 short years. You surf over to their websites and it feels like a commercial endeavor, yet it’s Open Source at it’s very best.
With the 1.5 version of Joomla! on the horizon, I decided to spend the last few days testing out RC3. I loaded it up on a Debian server and went about tweaking the sample data site and trying out the different templates from the 1.5 template contest.
My first impression was that it felt much better running the backend administrator, especially in Firefox, my browser of choice. With all the new templates adhering to XHTML standards, eschewing tables, the sample site just popped, rendering was very quick.
Now for the not so good news:
Firefox: After a day of tweaking the sample site, the browser felt very sluggish and the memory usage rose to 250mb. Normally I never get above 100mb of used memory and that’s after a whole day of surfing.
APC: The web server is running a PHP opcode cache, I have it configured to use up to 128mb of memory. With all the dynamic sites running on this server, 17 at present, I barely get above 70mb of used memory. A day of tweaking Joomla! and the cache usage rose to 110mb.
I await RC4, so I can take Joomla! for another spin around the drive.
My preferred CMS is Textpattern, I’m firmly in the minimalistic camp. But for some of my clients, Joomla! would be a better fit, not that TxP couldn’t service them, it’s just that their wants and needs are mixed up.
You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometimes, you just might find
You get what you need