I’ve never really looked at Joomla before, mainly because I had no need and am using WordPress as my blogging platform.
However a work colleague recently asked me to help migrate a Jooma 1.0 site to Joomla 1.5. Their site was a small online shop using the Virtuemart shopping cart.
In the end someone else did the work but it got me looking at Joomla in more detail.
It took me a while to work out the sections and categories as well as all the modules but after the rather steep learning curve I can see that Joomla is a very powerful CMS.
I made a test install using WampServer and had the site up and runnig in just a few minutes. The install instructions are very easy to follow and the install went very smoothly.
After that I installed Virtuecart, Joom!Fish and Ninja shadowbox.
JoomFish makes adding translations extremely easy (I live in Denmark so many sites are in Danish and English) and getting a basic site working was a pleasure.
Card Processing Fees
Looking at Joomla got me thinking about on-line shops so I investigated the cost of processing card payments in Denmark. Most people here use Dankort (a debit card) but to use this you have to sign up with PBS to get a merchant ID. Looking at their costs made me realise that a problem is the cost of traditional card processing companies.
PBS charges are shown here. For an account that only accepts Danish cards you pay DKK300 per month for 100 transaction (that’s about US $54) which seems a ridiculously large amount for a completely automated system.
If you want to accept VISA/Mastercard etc. then the prices is US $145 per month for 500 transactions.
I’ve read quite a few articles on companies trying to break this monopoly, most recently this one in Wired.
Hopefully these start-ups can change the balance of power and really open up micro payments and on-line shops to the masses.
