Joomla Worst CMS Ever

2012 April 22 at 03:59 » Tagged as :cms, lame, node.js, joomla,

Been a long time since I had a look at Joomla so decided to kick the tires on Joomla 2.5.4 but things didn't go smoothly which is not entirely unexpected. PHP CMS are better named as Content Mis-Management Systems. What happens when you unzip the download? It becomes a zip bomb by extracting all the files into the current working directory instead of extracting into a sub folder like any decent download bundle should. Having sorted out that mess the next step is to look at the quick start guide. Too bad it's only available for version 1.5 and 40 pages long. The readme file directs you to an installation page. But that is for version 1.7? Does such a version even exist?

8- Ready to install Joomla? * See minimum requirements here: http://www.joomla.org/technical-requirements.html * How do you install Joomla! ? - http://docs.joomla.org/Installing_Joomla!_1.7 * Start your Joomla experience building your site with a local test server. When ready it can be moved to an on-line hosting account of your choice. See the tutorial: http://docs.joomla.org/Tutorial:Joomla_Local_install

Do point your browser at 'http://www.yoursite.com/installation' as suggested by the installation guide. Move on to page you, you will come across a page titled 'Pre-Installation Check'. That page has this  gem:
PHP Version >= 5.2.4 Yes
Zlib Compression Support Yes
XML Support Yes
Database Support: (mysql, mysqli) Yes
INI Parser Support Yes
JSON Support Yes
configuration.php Writeable No You can still continue the installation as the configuration settings will be displayed at the end. You will have to manually upload the code. Click in the text area to highlight all of the code and then paste into a new text file. Name this file 'configuration.php' and upload it to your site root folder.
  Why not just tell us poor sobs that the configuration file is to be found at installation/models/configuration.php and that it's permissions should be changed? Probably because installation/models/configuration.php isn't the right file! but that is the only file named configuration.php in the whole bundle. It does give the option of creating the file manuall later. That's what I chose. In the last step, the installer say the configuration.php files should be in the installation root. In between  on step 5 they are trying to configure FTP. Who in his right mind uses FTP? On the last page it gives dire warnings about not being able proceed unless you remove the installation folder, there is even a button labeled 'remove installation folder'. Too bad that thing is guaranteed not to work. How can it? default permissions on the linux file system will not allow the webserver user to do so.  You need to rm -rf manually. So this bit of information on the installation guide is a deliberate lie.

With that done, Joomla! is now installed! The last step needed is to remove the installation directory - and the Joomla! installer does this for you as well! This needs removed for security reasons, to prevent anyone else from coming along and installing Joomla! again over your existing site. To do this, simple click the "Remove Installation Directory" button.

  Assuming that you manage to ssh and delete those files? what you do do next? Point your browser at the installation home page? You do that and you will get nothing more than a blank page.