Joomla as possibly THE Ultimate 7000+ extendable Outliner!

Posted by MadaboutDana
Apr 8, 2014 at 09:57 PM

Funnily enough, I have experimented with CMSes as outliners over a number of years. Each time, I’ve eventually come away feeling slightly frustrated, but each time, the concept has seemed more feasible - because modern computers are faster, CMS software is much more efficient (not least thanks to development for mobile), and because interfaces are improving.

For a while I ran Kerio Workspace as my main outliner, on an HP ProBook. That actually worked fairly well, not least because Kerio Workspace also backs itself up automatically. For me, the main issue in using CMSes as outliners is the ‘search’ function - only a very few CMSes have a really competent search function. And only a few allow you to output pages as e.g. PDF files using a simple ‘Print’ option.

But the concept is a good one, Don. In fact, the recent launch of ImpressPages 4.0 had me musing on whether to experiment with that on my current laptop (Lenovo Z370). The latest version of ImpressPages has a very nice dynamic editor that allows you to work straight into layout - it’s nicely designed and very easy to use. Not dissimilar, in fact, to the very good job Apple have done in transferring their iWork suite to the Cloud (their online apps, accessible through a web browser, are truly awesome). But ImpressPages doesn’t have anything like the wealth of extensions, themes, plugins etc. as Joomla or WordPress.

However, it’s worth bearing in mind that you can get a dynamic front-end editor for WordPress (can’t remember the name offhand, but if I do I’ll post it up here).