I think it's time to update your infrastructure

[wenshu]

Server: Apache/1.3.42 Ben-SSL/1.60 (Unix) PHP/4.4.9 with Suhosin-Patch

PHP 4 with the old mysql extension?

Damn, thats old.

Just saying.

[GeneChing]

Our infrastructure was designed by Steve Creel, who founded this forum. He built some really innovative stuff back in the day, but we took over the site about a decade ago, and our present IT doesn't like to mess with Steve's code for all sorts of reasons. The truth is that the forum here is low man on the totem pole, which is understandable when you consider our IT oversees our commerce sites as well as our office network, and that's a crucial to us staying in business. We've been discussing migrating to a new platform. One of our people is looking at converting us to Wordpress, but there's hesitancy as our TCEC Wordpress experiment has been so lackluster. Also, the biggest concern is losing links and data. When we last migrated the forum, it severed all of the hyperlinks to MAM - all those little embedded links I do, along some of you other loyal members - which wound up costing the company an astounding amount of income. It was devastating.

But I totally hear ya, wenshu. It's just like I said, low man on the totem pole.

[wenshu]

Our infrastructure was designed by Steve Creel, who founded this forum. He built some really innovative stuff back in the day, but we took over the site about a decade ago, and our present IT doesn't like to mess with Steve's code for all sorts of reasons. The truth is that the forum here is low man on the totem pole, which is understandable when you consider our IT oversees our commerce sites as well as our office network, and that's a crucial to us staying in business. We've been discussing migrating to a new platform. One of our people is looking at converting us to Wordpress, but there's hesitancy as our TCEC Wordpress experiment has been so lackluster. Also, the biggest concern is losing links and data. When we last migrated the forum, it severed all of the hyperlinks to MAM - all those little embedded links I do, along some of you other loyal members - which wound up costing the company an astounding amount of income. It was devastating.

But I totally hear ya, wenshu. It's just like I said, low man on the totem pole.

I interviewed for a gig where the majority of the work was migrating a substantial in production codebase from PHP4 to 5. Eff that.

Wordpress is so cumbersome and bloated, it sucks. I've used it for a couple sites and hate it. My present shop uses Expression Engine for a lot of front end stuff. http://ellislab.com/expressionengine

Licensed but its worth it to get a quality professional grade CMS without all the nonsense of Wordpress or Drupal (like encrypted javascript embedded into Themes that silently download malware).

The lost links wouldn't be an issue nowadays; that's what stackoverflow is for.

It looks like martialartsmart.com could use an upgrade as well.

A couple of medium reserved instances on EC2 with an ELB, HTTPS Ngnix with PHP-FPM, MongoDB and MySQL clusters on the backend. Sheeeeit, for an extra couple grand I'll even set up source control repository (svn or git) with continuous integration.

[MightyB]

don't you be messing with my links. I put a lot of thought into each and every thing I post!

[David Jamieson]

How do you feel about Joomla or Mambo? (very similar products seeing as they had same dev teams in early days that split later)

[wenshu]

How do you feel about Joomla or Mambo? (very similar products seeing as they had same dev teams in early days that split later)

I mean, Joomla has the same problems you get with Wordpress; security, need to constantly update and those updates are likely to break whatever theme/plugins you are using. Dependency on themes and plugins for layout apart from the baked-in boilerplate unless you're able, willing and funded to code the layouts yourself, and if thats the case you might as well just roll your own site/CMS with frameworks.

Expression Engine is really where it's at for CMS. Especially if you're going to drop some change on themeing anyways, precluding the whole justification for free opensource in the first place.

[GeneChing]

Sadly, our budget is limited and our business sites take priority. For the record, you're talking way past me as I'm not an IT person. Thanks for the input however. I'll show it to our IT person and maybe we'll make some headway. He's pretty busy however keeping the rest of the company going.

[David Jamieson]

I mean, Joomla has the same problems you get with Wordpress; security, need to constantly update and those updates are likely to break whatever theme/plugins you are using. Dependency on themes and plugins for layout apart from the baked-in boilerplate unless you're able, willing and funded to code the layouts yourself, and if thats the case you might as well just roll your own site/CMS with frameworks.

Expression Engine is really where it's at for CMS. Especially if you're going to drop some change on themeing anyways, precluding the whole justification for free opensource in the first place.

I think Joomla is beyond wordpress, but each has it's audience. Wordpress is more for bloggers in many respects so, I don't compare them due to Joomla actually being more like The CMS you are touting which also looks good and at 300 bucks for the full blown set up it's comparable forwards and back with Joomla.

This Article does not a bad run down on the pros of each.
I think it even answered a few of the other questions I had.

[wenshu]

I think Joomla is beyond wordpress, but each has it's audience. Wordpress is more for bloggers in many respects so, I don't compare them due to Joomla actually being more like The CMS you are touting which also looks good and at 300 bucks for the full blown set up it's comparable forwards and back with Joomla.\

This is true. WordPress has become a de facto CMS even though it was designed to function primarily as a blogging platform. Although I think it has evolved to accomodate complete CMS use cases.

I'm not a front end guy so my experience is limited, but I'm told that Joomla has the same kind and frequency of frustrations and limitations as Wordpress if not more.

If you really want to get crazy you can run WordPress on Joomla on Expression Engine! Why? Because you can!

Speaking of WordPress, check yo self!

[David Jamieson]

I use Joomla front and back for quick set up and implementation of sites.
I like the expression engine stuff I've seen but I really don't mind the granular aspects of Joomla. I'll look into EE and play with it soon. It might very well be viable for some of the solutions I am looking at.

The thing I like about Joomla is the ability to customize the crap out of it and the bajillion extensions and modules and templates that there are for it. And that it is still open source and free.