CMS Week – Joomla! - The Art Company's Blog

What is Joomla!?

Joomla! is one of the most popular CMS. On the one hand, it's definitely not as easy to set up as a personal blog on any free blogging platform, but on the other hand, it grants you total control on the way your website is displayed, managed and updated. And in case you need help, Joomla! features a highly detailed help section on its website which can bring light on any problem you may have during installation and configuration.

The Joomla! logo

With Joomla!, you can set up a complete website in minutes. You don't need to design or code anything; as long as your test or production environment meets the requirements (PHP and MySQL), you're ready to go. The whole website is configured and customized through web menus, so that the only thing you need to worry about is creating good content for your site.

Joomla! comes under the GNU/GPL licence. It is easy to install and easy to administer. It is highly flexible and very stable. And it doesn't require the user or the administrator to master HTML or PHP.

What should Joomla! be used for?

In its early days, Joomla! was a Mambo (another well-known CMS) fork. Since its last version (1.5), Joomla! has moved away from its ancestor and is now based on a completely rewritten codebase. It's particularly well suited to setup portfolios, website for communities or institutions, blogs and more.

Although Joomla! is easy to use, it may require a bit of messing around and testing. The Joomla package consists of many different parts, which are built to be as modular as possible, allowing extensions and integrations to be made easily. It heavily relies on extensions to expand its core features, such as plug-ins, components and modules.

Since it has been around longer, there are more extensions available for Joomla 1.0 than for Joomla 1.5, although native 1.5 extensions are becoming increasingly available. Some of the older 1.0 extensions can be used with version 1.5 if it is set to legacy mode. Also, the Joomla! community is one of the most active and helpful in the content management world.

Joomla permits administrators to set global configuration parameters that affect all articles. Every page conforms to these parameters by default, but a page can have its own setting for each parameter. For example, you can elect to show the article author, hide the author, or simply go with the global "show author" parameter.

Joomla!'s administration menu is built with content in mind, instead of functionalities, since it's easier to think content than structure. The main menu bar, by giving a direct access to articles, news, categories, polls, helps the user adopt the right work methodology. The admin module is well organized and can be used pretty rapidly, even if it'll take a couple of weeks of daily practice to master.

Main Joomla! features

Multi-lingual support
Easy template management
User can choose his WYSIWYG editor
Templates can include conditional display and formatting based on the content being served
Management of menus, weblinks, advertising banners, forms, polls and multimedia files
Newsflashes
SEF (Search Engine Friendly) URL rewriting, so your pages get a better indexing in search engines
Statistics
Automated extension installer
Content archiving and backup
Integrate with external web apps or services with LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol)
Compatible with most of the extensions developed for Joomla! 1.0

Strengths

Easy to setup, deploy and administer
Easy template personalization
Pre-publishing (you can post an article with a date in the future)
Complete META (title, keyword and description) handling for each article
Integrated multimedia files manager
Page caching
Benefits from a large, enthusiast and proactive community

Weaknesses

User group management is very limited
No granular access control and no control over the ACL
No subcategories
No standard comment management (an extension is required)
Basic content archiving

Final thoughts

Joomla! is simple, effective, straightforward, and does (very well) what it's expected to do — there's no doubt about it. It's a nice product, with nice features, and it's both easy to setup and easy to use. But it's a bit light when it comes to serving large projects. It lacks some essential capabilities, like better server load balancing, enhanced security and user management, and improved scalability. Joomla! will be your loyal companion for building a reasonably-sized blog or website, but if your intention is to start a large enterprise-level platform, you should seriously consider some more robust alternatives.