It's taken me some time to get my head around this radically different management tool.  Years ago, when I started out, (walking to school... 20 miles, in the snow... uphill both ways...) I coded web pages in a text editor.  Eventually I incorporated tools like Netscape Composer and NVU to speed things up a bit.  But with a lot of my pages containing both Javascript and PHP, I still coded most sites by hand.  Eventually I migrated the HiwayPilot site to a WordPress blog. Mostly this was simply a time saving step.  I didn't want to compose a new page for every post.  When I started building my own content management engine, I realized that was sort of reinventing the wheel.  The tools exist, use them.  So I did.

Joomla! is extremely tweakable. It's also a bit "hands on" as far as content placement. But the customization runs circles around WordPress. (No offense WordPress guys. I still think WordPress is the most approachable blogging, site management tool out there.)  I should probably have read more and practiced a bit before switching, but hey, what fun would that be?

So please excuse the mess. (And it will get messy before it gets better.)  I will try to learn how to tame this beast as quickly as possible and hopefully create some useful tutorials along the way.

 
Joomla! provides an easy-to-use graphical user interface that simplifies the management and publishing of large volumes of content including HTML, documents, and rich media. Joomla! is used by organisations of all sizes for Public Web sites, Intranets, and Extranets and is supported by a community of thousands of users.

And I kinda like it. (now)