Joomla! VS eleventy 🕚⚡️

Joomla! is one of popular PHP content management systems (aka CMS). It is good for portal-like websites as well as blogging platforms. The first version was released in 2005 and, after long progress, the latest major one was done two years ago (on 2021-08-17).

CMSs have long been the backbone of digital content creation and delivery. Traditional CMS platforms, including open-source solutions like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal, have been popular due to their ease of use and integration of content creation and presentation.

This post will be discussing a cutting-edge concept known as a Headless Visual CMS, or Headless Visual Content Management System. This is not your ordinary CMS; we are not referring to platforms like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Sanity.io, Contentful, or anything like that. Instead, we're talking about a fusion of the best headless CMS features and the simplicity of site builders like Wix or Squarespace.

Website: https://www.joomla.org/

To help illustrate my point, here's a short rendition of my personal career trajectory. I started out studying Marine Biology. Then taught ESL. Then worked in non-profits in Mexico and Central America. Then became really interested in building online businesses to related to the travel industry. So while living in a small jungle community in Honduras, I decided to teach myself how to make websites. I chose PHP as my first programming language to learn (with CSS and HTML) using the Joomla framework. Living in a small town, which just received dialup internet and lacked running water, I wasn't exactly in tech-hub. But I dedicated the hours and spent many long days (and nights) wrestling with the concepts of a CMS, learning CSS (for IE6 no less) and figuring out how to make a really ugly website. Then an amazing thing happened. Word got out in the town I was living in that I knew how to make websites, and suddenly owner of the internet cafe I had been living at for the past 4 weeks asked me to make them a website. So I did! Then they referred me to others in the town who needed websites and soon I had a side hustle that was allowing me to learn and earn at the same time.

1. Joomla

Content/learning management systems, such as Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, Magento and Moodle are fullstack web applications that you can configure and customize for course websites, blogs and e-commerce. Many if not all of these options are popular and open source.

You are complaining that the oldest PR (https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/pull/21775) is 4 years old but you didn't talk about the very important truth you already know: it was a code dump, the contributor showed zero interest in making any improvements from the time they made the PR. Nobody can merge it if it's not worked on and as you can see the leadership DID ask the contributor in January if he's interested in addressing the problems. Zero feedback since.

This post outlines the steps for migrating an existing BlogCFC blog to a JamStack, with a focus on using Eleventy.

I suggest you to try out eleventhy (https://www.11ty.dev/)

Quite simple to start, and a nice system to add some scripting and styles without the requirement of bringing in a framework.

A production flag enables you to run activities in dev or production such as minifying assets, showing draft posts, etc. There isn't a built-in flag or function that comes with eleventy (11ty) specifically for this. However we have this info at our fingertips.

I can't recommend Eleventy enough!

https://www.11ty.dev

I converted my WordPress blog to Eleventy 4 years ago and never looked back, it's been delightful!

https://www.joshcanhelp.com/taking-wordpress-to-eleventy/

It’s 2024, and you are about to start a new project. Do you reach for React, a framework you know and love or do you look at one of the other hot new frameworks like Astro, Enhance, 11ty, SvelteKit or gasp, plain vanilla Web Components?

The "dev" script is running the eleventy server in dev mode. The details of the script are not important for this discussion, but to round out the background here is an abbreviated version of my package.json:

Eleventy is a fast and powerful SSG that really shines when it comes to pure static site generation because it does not require the loading of a client-side JavaScript bundle in order to serve content.

The irony is using a JavaScript-based static site generator to make the site: https://www.11ty.dev

https://doublejosh.com/post/186193119278/metalsmithjs-is-sti...

Then two years ago I needed a more robust SSR system based on React, so I went with GatsbyJS. It's insanely mature and intuitive, but as we all know that community and business is now drying up too. But the framework is still great.

Now everyone sings the praises of NextJS, which can be used for SSR but is intended for applications and active server endpoints. But more complexity doesn't mean better.

I'm keen to try other simple frameworks when the result is a static site. I may give https://www.11ty.dev a shot.

11ty is a lightweight static site generator. I chopped up my HTML and used the 11ty starter template called eleventy-base-blog as the structural foundation for the site.