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PHP sucks

U
Ujaya

OK, so I finally quit my pathetic and inactive Guild Wars guild. Most of the members hadn't logged on in over a month and the only guy that played as much as I do, quit and joined his friend's guild.

So instead of taking Rythmdevl up on his very kind offer to join his guild, I decided to create my own guild, force all of my friends to play Guildwars and  make a website for the  guild. Not that I have OCD or anything.....

I figured out  pretty quickly  that a content management system of some kind would be  necessary for the website, so that  I wouldn't have to handcraft everything on the site and users could post stuff by themselves. After perusing my options, I settled on Joomla, because the website said it was EASY and it looked like it was gaining popularity.

I found a host for the site that specialized in Joomla hosting and claimed to have good customer service, they set me up within a few hours and the tech support was indeed very good. After logging in to the administrative interface, I realized two things:

1. Programmers should NOT be in charge of UI design
2. The available Joomla templates (even the paid ones) are flippin boring

No problem, I said to myself.....I WILL MAKE MY OWN!!! 

I used to make websites for my various employers and friends back in the stone age when Netscape was still popular, I remember the basics....so, I'm thinking....how hard could it be to teach myself PHP over the Christmas Holiday?  Well, it's been a pain in the ass. To my eyes, HTML is very logical and is pretty straight forward, but PHP seems unnecessarily cryptic and cluttered. Add to that, the Mambo/Joomla architecture and it's attendant lack of decent documentation or editing tools and it gets a little tedious. I have a week off, so by the end of my vacation, I hope to open up a Joomla template business. [View Image]

And before all you web programmers get your panties in a bundle and start  flaming me for bagging on PHP,  just remember.............uh, nevermind. Go ahead, flame on.

[View Image]

Comments (3)

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doodirock·
If you don't like php let me just say one thing. You will hate everything else. It's one of the easier programming languages to learn, and has some of the best documentation around. Also, the sad fact is that Joomla's UI was NOT designed by programmers. They used actual UI designers to do interface design and usability. In terms of quality backend CMS though, I would move straight to Drupal. It maybe be harder to learn, but its much more powerful and had an easier template engine.
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Ujaya·
I am familiar with other programming languages, I just don't want to learn them to put up a web site. I don't really want to learn PHP either, but one does what one must. \r \r If the Joomla admin interface was designed by professional UI designers, I'd hate to se what else they designed. I really think it assumes that you understand how the system works internally, the relationship between the style sheets, PHP and the XML. Settings are oddly organized and all over the place and not named logically in many cases. Also, the documentation is not great, I ended up learning it from some guy's website and then just picking apart the code and running it against a local Joomla/Apache/PHP server utility that someone made. \r \r I'm not incapable of learning this stuff, in fact I think I have it down pretty good for three days of work. I just didn't expect to have to based on the marketing materials.\r \r I did look into Drupal, but there were so many complaints about it in the forums I looked at, that I decided to try the fruity \"easy\" system instead. Oh well.\r
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Rythmdevl·
programming talk aside, congrats on your new Guild. The Gurus are gathering their info for when the clan pages come out, and some of our resident tekkies are working on a page also. It is incredibly rewarding running your own Guild, but it can also be an incredible time drain. We do most of our recruitment thru 2old, and we have a sister Guild that we cooperativly play with. Once your up and running, we would love to throw another Guild into the mix. Factions allows Alliances, and Guild Wars Gurus is aligned Luxon. The sister Guild is aligned Kurzick. Just some food for thought. Good luck.