I’m happy to report that the site Indie Music Reviews has just been launched. This site designed under our design company Kliky.Com offered interesting insight into the use of open source content management systems, in this case Joomla. You can view the site url at:
http://www.indiemusicreviews.net/
The first thing I’d need to comment on is the administrator panel for Joomla. As a developer and using it to run my .Com business site I love it, however during the course of the project (and the same thing happened with another project), I found that in some ways the administrator and user tools may be “overbuilt”. Indie Music Reviews is a review site in which the owner was able to find a many (50+) possible writers/journalists to send in music revies. However, we found very quickly that the editing tools and basic process was much too complicated for there user base.
I tried downloading JCE for Joomal, which I found that I liked so much I’m now using it on my own sites, however, even the ability to simplify this editor was still too complicated for the users. I ended up having to build a custom application for the reviewers allowing for only a title and text field along with an image uploader, which I’d build to resize images on the fly, insert and format into the articles.