Joomla! VS Tailwind CSS

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.

You can use any frontend framework you want — react-based tooling, however, has a natural advantage as it models everything as a function of state, which can map 1:1 with the concept in Burr. In the demo app we use react, react-query, and tailwind, but we’ll be skipping over this largely (it is not central to the purpose of the post).

Tailwind CSS: A utility-first CSS framework for rapidly building custom designs.

First, you need to make sure that you have a working Tailwind CSS project…

Tailwind CSS

With better CSS approaches like TailwindCSS and Vanilla Extract (which we're heavily using) it's much easier to maintain the UI and make sure it doesn't change unexpectedly. No more conflicting CSS classes, much less CSS specificity issues and much less CSS code in general.

This app was built with Svelte Kit, Tailwind CSS, and many other technologies. For a full rundown, please visit the GitHub repository

Unlike Tailwind, which has over 77,000 stars on GitHub, Mojo CSS has about 200 stars on GitHub. But the Mojo CSS documentation is fairly good and you can find most of the information you’ll need there.

JavaScript React Flowbite Tailwind Firebase - Auth, Database, and Hosting Vite

- Performance is a feature.

Another common interpretation of brutalism is aesthetic, reacting to overly complicated user interfaces by creating simpler, more direct ones. Tailwind CSS (https://tailwindcss.com), one of today's most popular CSS libraries, promotes this approach in its component examples. There's also a neat library I've seen recently called "Neobrutalism Components" for React that I like (https://neobrutalism-components.vercel.app), providing components with a similar look and feel to Gumroad. This might more accurately be called 'Neo-Brutalism,' as noted in the comments.

A more engineering-centric interpretation of Brutalism focuses on form, structure, and efficiency, drawing significantly from brutalist architecture principles. Apart from the user interface itself, most mobile, desktop, and web applications are extremely bloated and often perform worse than sites from 10 years ago did. While one HTML file might be "less brutalist" than the original HN site, it is substantially more brutalist than any HN mobile app in existence, and offers nearly identical functionality.

A broader interpretation of brutalism, which could be termed 'Meta-Brutalism,' is embodied in the overall experience on this site through UX flows. Yes, in the strictest sense, the original HN site is more Brutalist in many ways, but it only shows 30 articles at a time and does not function as a PWA. For this site, the experience of reading 10 stories is arguably less brutalist, but for quickly browsing through several pages and skimming articles (which is how I read HN) it is a lot faster, and in my opinion, more Brutalist.

My primary inspiration was addressing software and tool bloat in UIs rather than strictly adhering to every principle set forth by David Bryant Copeland. I don't find it convincing that this site "isn't brutalist" compared to really any other experience apart from the Main HN site, and I would argue the overall experience is more brutalist in its performance and scrolling behavior.

As a side note: I generally don't like Brutalist architecture that much although I believe it is unfairly maligned. I visited the Salk Institute once and enjoyed it though (https://www.archdaily.com/61288/ad-classics-salk-institute-l...).

- Staff Software Engineer ($275k/yr): https://tailwindcss.com/careers/staff-software-engineer

We're small, independent, and profitable, with a team of just 6 people doing millions in revenue, and growing sustainably every year. You'd work directly with the founders on open-source software used by millions of people.

If you like the idea of working on a small team that cares about craft and isn't trying to achieve VC scale, I think this is a pretty awesome place to do your best work.