I agree with this:
Thanks for the opportunity to do the survey. I thought I would add that some of the questions did not provide an adequate answer, and since there was no comment box, there was no way to qualify those answers. I suppose it doesn't matter except that it means some of the data you received from me, and likely from others, is invalid.
But we can use the forum to add some further details...
The biggest thing I wanted to comment on was the lack of choices for the kinds of "industries" we've designed sites for, such as:
1) media/magazine/newspaper sites
2) political campaign sites and other advocacy/fundraising/organizing related sites
3) non-profits
Notably these are big industry blind spots Joomla has. The FOSS needs of these industries are mostly served by Drupal. Joomla could clean up in these sectors if it rethought some of its dumber core quirks and 3PD extension developers catered to these industries more. (Core quirks such as content with 1 section and 1 category--that's it, with no multi-category status. What?!?!? 1.5 is a huge disappointment in this respect, for retaining such key limitations from 1.0.)
iJoomla and JoomlArt are the exceptions in offering (better late than never) extensions and templates for media sites. However, their offerings in this area are really in need of major improvement to be truly enterprise ready. iJoomla news and magazine products have an innate problem in that they build a virtually new CMS layer on top of Joomla, tyring to compensate for its inadequacy for "real publishing" rather than hack the core and make it the way it ought to be--and suitable for serious media enterprises. (I've written about this stuff at iJoomla and Joomlart recently and in the past.)
I was at a conference this past week for traditional mainstream journalists and new media "citizen journalists" to explore common ground and areas of possible collaboration and learning as the old media embraces new media. Drupal devotees were well represented, several having been active with or funded by big Knight Foundation grants. Joomla is a familiar rival but seems to have lower penetration among journalistic enterprises seeking a FOSS solution because the community has no entry point for them. Perhaps as a remedy, there are several Ning groups where "wired journalists" and perhaps other sites where techies and developers involved with journalism projects might congregate and think about creating some presence for themselves in the Joomla community.
At the same time, I am also partial to the "CMSes are dead" idea---if Joomla can't transition to a social publishing architecture, Drupal and Wordpress probably can and will. If Drupal cleans up on a few major drawbacks it has for implementation with non-technical clients, I will probably be using it and/or Wordpress more than Joomla in 1-2 years.
It also didn't have a place to say that I am not a web designer by trade! Rather I build sites for myself to advertise my products and to help promote my clients. I don't have a budget and I don't have a title other than "owner."
The same goes for me. I do all of the roles listed in the survey, not just one, and I don't need budgets for these dsame reasons.
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