I was lead to Joomla by a beautiful website, whose source indicated that it was created by something called Joomla editor.

The takeaway

Joomla! is way too annoying. Not convenient at all, unless you have money to spend on modules. The set-up itself was somewhat clean once I got everything configured on the server, but it supports a complexity I didn't need for this project. If you need a lot of complexity to the website (e.g. a blog with many users managing content) it's not for you.

Installing Joomla!

• The main installation tutorial is here
• Don't forget to update PHP (instructions for Amazon Linux)
• I use nginx instead of Apache. For that, I had to do some extra configuration
  • This includes whatever FastCGI is, instructions here
  • Gawsh, I had to change who could listen to the socket
  • And set up the socket itself (look at the specific instructions in the FastCGI tutorial above...
• I also changed the htaccess.txt file to .htaccess at a forum's suggestion. Not sure if that helped.
• I needed to check "Use URL Rewriting" to get the URLs for the demo website to work properly

Installing "JCE" (the Joomla editor)

It (looks) easy! Add the option to install extensions from the web, and search for it. Unfortunately this doesn't work for me because of some unknown bug.

• Change permissions of the Joomla! home directory so that anything can edit it. E.g. sudo chmod -R a+w JOOMLA/
• Now simply drag and drop the .zip file for the plugin
• I had to increase the upload limit in both nginx.conf and php.ini

This all took me forever to figure out, but it works now!

The verdict

It seems for my website, I would need this plugin to do it without a ton of effort. It costs $40! So I am either done with this, or will continue by buying the damn add-on. The positive of having a Joomla site is that editing is easy.