The North Toronto Gang
Seven of us met at the Frog & Firkin at Sheppard/Yonge yesterday evening, November 9, 2011. A good mix of regulars, new regulars, and about-to-be-regulars.A wide variety of Joomla usage was represented. Joomla acting as a front-end wrapper for a legacy system. Joomla the basis of consulting businesses. Joomla sites being built for others. Joomla sites the basis of start-ups. It’s hard to get into the nitty-gritty of all the sites in so short a time.
Actually, I’m taken aback just by the “elevator” summaries! There are so many different things that are being packed into one site!
I notice that there is one question that is rarely ventured. Perhaps being the son of a pharmacist has something to do with it, hearing about Drug Interactions over the years (anyone read the Merck Manual?!). Add to your list of questions if anyone at the meeting has encountered issues when different extensions & templates reside on the same Joomlas site.
Security, templating, the different Joomla versions, and the oft-asked “what about Facebook” were popular topics.
Over the years of attending JUGT meet-ups, I’m noticing that the questions have deeper contexts now. It used to be general “what template club do you like?”. Now, it’s “I want to do this-and-this-and-that-and-that” and what extensions and templates will achieve it.
We barely touched on security — I want to mention here to delete extensions you are not using.
We talked about Akeeba Backup, and of course I love it. However, it’s better to understand how to backup and restore “raw” first. At least understand configuration.php! I suggested yesterday that one should restore their site to a test site with AB (or whatever!) when their site is humming along. Two reasons: restoring is a skill; and, you should test your backups. If something is wrong with your backup, the time to find out is sooner than later. The time to learn restoring is, ahem, sooner than later!
Tienda was a topic of conversation:
- For those of you who downloaded Tienda 6 to 12 months ago and then did not download it again, go look at Tienda again. It is moving right along;
- Had a terrific discussion about Tienda vs Magento. Really, y’all should check out my podcasts & blog!
- I was asked if Tienda cost $100. Absolutely not. Dioscouri.com’s support for Tienda cost $100/month, which is completely optional. Tienda itself is free. There is only one Tienda version, and it’s FOSS. So, go download it!
I cringe when people matter-of-factly say they are installing Virtuemart. I assume they mean VM 1.1.x series. You do realize that this code started as “PHPShop”, then “Mambo Shop”, then “Virtuemart 1.0 for Joomla 1.0″, then “Virtuemart 1.1 for Joomla 1.5″ — note that it’s not VM 1.5 MVC for Joomla 1.5. Maybe you do not care about the code underneath the hood, but you should! Maybe you are seduced by the “Editor’s Choice” logo on the VM’s JED listing, but there’s no article justifying this decision, especially why they are gracing their “seal of approval” on a non-MVC extension. As well, I assume that there’s an implicit decision to migrate to VM 2.0 when it’s released, which is not without its issues. But, Tienda is dismissed out-of-hand! My considered opinion: you are better off building pet features in Tienda than coping with VM issues. So there!
Here’s a good post about Magento from a LinkedIn groupthat I’m adding as a follow-up to a discussion…
Magento is a very capable product should have no issue with handling 3500+ products. However, there are a lot of other factors that you should consider before making a eCommerce platform decision.
Things like: site traffic expectations, product categories, daily order volume, revenue projections, growth potential, on-line marketing strategy, technical capability of your staff, and system integrations.
I’d recommend you take the time to outline your business goals and objectives up-front and make sure that the product you select is a good fit across the board.
