I’d love to use Freeway with a content management system for some clients (I’ve tried WebYep), but $250 is a bit to spend. I’ve been working with Joomla and need to get to the “design templates” stage to be happy, but I was wondering, before I experiment with Express Engine, what does that have over Joomla? It looks like I would still have to use Express Engine templates. Can anyone say -yes you can design your site and have a few content management pages that can look like the rest of the site? Or -those page will just look different.
And the other drawback seems to be that with Joomla you can work internally until your site is ready to install on the server and with Express Engine the server is the starting point.
First of all, there is no tested mechanism that allows Joomla templates to be made with Freeway (except for the mysterious new action on Actionforge). There is a proven EE action suite for Freeway however, and yes you can create templates for EE using it.
Joomla is open source and so it must depend on the developer/user community to keep it updated or to add new features. EE is a for profit product so it has a company behind to offer support. There is limited support for the free version of EE also of course. Joomla support would come from the user/developer community only, not that that is a bad thing, and of course it is one of the most popular free CMS around.
I’m in the same boat as bunsworth. I’m currently testing all cms options with Freeway. I have bought all action sets (WebYep, Joomla! and EE) so i can try them all out. I haven’t been able to get my EE site working with EE’s content yet although i must say the action sets all work fine and it’s my own lack of dev knowledge that is struggling. If you’re thinking of cost, i think EE will work out more expensive than WebYep if you’re doing this commercially, but it is more involved and flexible as a CMS system.
I’ve yet to test the Joomla! action suite but will post when i get somewhere with it.
If anyone else has comments regarding Joomla! or EE, I’d be happy to hear it too.
Now that we have action(s) available for Joomla! template making I would say definately consider this option. Although Joomla! cms is fairly dense (some would say the same of me) it is not overly complex, there are a lot of reference books available, and it’s free to use. I have looked at the different actions available from both action suppliers and they both do what they claim. I would say Paul’s suite of actions has the edge for features related to styling however.
Good to hear your comments chuck. I spent a lot of time on Joomla and found it not so daunting. I just needed to jump into template making to be happy. I’m going to revisit it with the Freeway templates.