Update your email address at Virtualmin.com!

Joomla 1.0.12. With a few customizations. Installed by Virtualmin to run under mod_fcgid, of course, though I'll probably also add one of the many accelerators and some other fun stuff to keep things zoomy (it's plenty fast right now, but when we throw thousands of users at it, plus the users that we expect to get going forward as we begin marketing and pushing for sales and more users, it'll have to work a lot harder).

For forums I'm using Joomlaboard with minor tweaks.

Shopping cart is VirtueMart, with major tweaks (actually, I've written the software license manager from scratch and just added a mambot to add to it on purchases, so minor tweaks to core VirtueMart code, but lots of additional code written). I'll blog about these changes and release the mambot and such at some point in the not distant future.

Bug and issues are merging down into a single Flyspray installation.

Documentation is in a DokuWiki.

And finally, FAQs are handled by EasyFaq, but I suspect this will be merged into the Wiki pretty quickly. The special purpose FAQ seems an unnecessary separation when wikis are so useful for that sort of thing--and we'd like for users to be able to read the FAQ, follow the instructions, and then say, "Hey, wait a minute! That didn't work right! I had to also do X, Y and Z to get it working."

Hey Vance,

Cool. I liked the looks of the Drupal architecture better (URLs in Joomla are frankly stupid, and the ad hoc nature of everything is a bit disconcerting), but it doesn't have the apps we need, and in the apps it does have, they are missing some vital features. So we've ended up with Joomla. Both are damned impressive, however, in how much one can do before you have to start writing code--I'm in agreement with Larry Wall laziness is one of the supreme virtues of being a developer. If I don't have to write code to get things working the way I want, I'm happy. I can't say that's entirely true of Joomla, but it was more true of Joomla than our current OpenACS system and more than any other CMS I looked at.

The worst thing about Joomla (which Drupal gets right) is that there's way too much crap happening in the default page. Everything anyone ever wanted to see on a front page is displayed by default in Joomla. That kind of design and architecture only makes sense for a very very very limited subset of websites, and yet, it's the default in Joomla. It took me weeks to figure out how to get rid of everything and start from scratch. And even now there are some elements that I'd like to reduce in complexity, but the only way I can without altering code is to add a "display:none" to the CSS element for it!

I've never heard of Fireboard, but I'll definitely check it out. I like that Joomlaboard feels "native", unlike the more powerful SMF. SMF is also way too complicated and stupid looking--a lot of people love it, but we're looking for clean and simple, so we can make it look like a natural part of the website, rather than a bolted on thing.

Whoah! The Fireboard guys have a kickass site (unlike the Joomlaboard guys...it's a nightmare to look at). I'll have to give it a look. Joomlaboard has no issues that are bugging me, but if Fireboard is a drop-in replacement and has some improvements, it might be worth an hour or two to switch before launch.

<i>Nice clean, non-busy layout.</i>

1 for 2. It's busy. Not busy by Joomla site standards, but still way busy by my reckoning. They haven't stripped out all of the stupid Joomla garbage, and have even added some! (By this, I'm referring to all of the extraneous icons surrounding every news item on the front page, particularly the little views counter with the graph icon by every item, unnecessary page sections--a lot of that stuff ought not be on the front page.)

But, who am I to judge. Current Virtualmin.com is horrible design. It was whipped together over a weekend, while I was fighting with all of the other behind the scenes crap, and hasn't seen an update since then. The new site will be significantly cleaner (and I know my design limitations, so simplicity will win over fancy ideas).

Anyway, after reading up on it, I noted that as you've stated, it is the continuation of Joomlaboard, so it'll definitely be what we run. I'm not looking forward to having to strip out all of the new extra crap from the style and markup, but if they're as good as it looks like they are, I'll be able to do it all in style sheets.

Hey Stephan,

It lives here:

http://www.bestofjoomla.com/

It's got some changes from JoomlaBoard that I really do not like (a lot more crap on every page, and no easy way to get rid of it--they refer to it as &quot;Improved pathway&quot; and other sorts of &quot;Improved&quot; bits, but to me it's all just duplicated garbage that detracts from the point of a forum...but I'm weird that way...a lot of people seem to like really busy and complicated forums packages). And since it's the only supported variant now, I guess I'll have to run with it and figure out how to get rid of the extra crap.

BTW-It doesn't run under Mambo. I thought it worth mentioning, since Scott brought up Mambo, and often there is some compatibility between Joomla and Mambo (JoomlaBoard, for example, could be convinced to run with Mambo, I believe).

Hey Vance,

Thanks for the kind words. My design skills are weak, but definitely improving (I've been hanging out with some famously great designers lately...I guess it's rubbing off on me). As you've noted, a lot of what I've been doing is reducing the complexity of the Joomla pages. Even the Joomla.org designers (who do as good a job as any that come to mind) haven't tamed the complexity.

Lately I've been fighting with URLs. I believe folks in the Joomla community have a really broken view of URLs. All of the components that address them are targeted to search engines! Why on earth would I care what a search engine thinks of my website!? I care what users think (and, interestingly, if take good care of my users, more people will link to us which will increase our ranking in search engines)! Joomla URLs are horrible for users. Working with Joomla all this time has reminded me why I chose OpenACS for this site...it gets a lot of things right that others get wrong. ;-)

Anyway, I'll stop rambling and get back to work. We've got a lot of stuff to launch (not just the website), and we'd like to launch it all sooner rather than later.