Joomla

Content Management Systems

"Why a CMS" is a better place to start than "Why Joomla".

Leading content management systems have several advantages over traditional website systems. For example:

  • WYSIWYG editing tools make it easy for non-technical users to maintain the content
  • many users can simultaneously administer the website
  • a web browser is all that is required to maintain the website
  • access control enables multiple roles such as editor, publisher and administrator
  • visual presentation is separated from the content through the use of templates which simplifies maintenance
  • features are easily added using plug-ins and modules
  • they are free and open source

These innovations make web development and maintenance more affordable and this is an important consideration for businesses.

Currently, the top 3 content management systems are WordPress, Joomla and Drupal.

Why Joomla

Search and you will find many articles on WordPress vs. Joomla vs. Drupal with some being more objective than others. It's a bit like the PC vs. Mac. vs. Linux debate where few reviewers are completely impartial and often tend to favour the system they are most familiar with. In fact, each system has it's own strengths and weaknesses and one will often be more suitable for a particular purpose.

A larger design firm with several staff may have experts in Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress and possibly other CMSs and can select the most suitable CMS for each job. To be a successful freelancer, the best approach for me is to be an expert in one CMS system rather than trying to keep up to date with three or more and being an expert in none.

Versatility

Joomla may not be the best CMS for a pure blog website (Wordpress is probably better) or have the best performance (Drupal is probably better), but there are nearly 10,000 extensions available to make Joomla a great platform for blogging, e-commerce, forums, galleries, social networking, directories, a combination of these, or anything else you can think of.

Rapid Development

A Drupal/Joomla/Wordpress showdown was conducted during the South by Southwest Interactive festival in 2009 where competing teams had up to 100 hours to construct a website to a specification. The Joomla team were able to achieve a better result in much less time than either of the other two teams:

  Drupal Joomla! WordPress
Total Hours 79.25 57.25 90.5
Hours spent on front end 21.75 15 36.5
HTML Validation No (8 errors) Yes No (8 errors)
CSS Validation No (7 errors) No (1 error) No (21 errors)
Page weight 180K 140K 154K
Lines of custom PHP/JS code 220 30 1,808

As you can see from the results, the Joomla website was completed fastest with the best code quality, the smallest page size and with the least lines of custom code by far.

Ultimately, the cost of ownership of a Joomla website is lower and you end up with a better quality website for the time and money spent.

Conclusion

I choose Joomla as it is the most versatile leading CMS and I can build good quality websites quicker, with more features and more affordably than with anything else. This ultimately benefits you, the consumer!

Update: Check out some Joomla statistics on the official Joomla YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qjnc0H8utks

References

http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management/all
http://www.cmswire.com/cms/web-cms/sxsw-web-content-management-system-showdown-update-2-004124.php
http://www.yardstickservices.com/blog/why-joomla-is-a-great-choice-for-small-business-websites