Nowadays, the process of developing and designing websites has become much simpler and more intuitive with the advent of content management systems or CMS. Content management systems are ready made frameworks or infrastructures which constitute the basic rudiments of a website and can be further developed, modified and customized to fit the exclusive needs of people who want their own website. It is easy to add features and change behavior, and all this can be achieved without going into major coding efforts.
Joomla is one of the most popular content management systems in use today. Used by a variety of businesses, and professionals around the world, Joomla is easy to deploy, customize and modify, has a large number of extensions and modules available, a large and active base of users and developers around the world who are ready to provide support and help, and is also free and open source. All these positive benefits have resulted in Joomla emerging as one of the hottest open source CMS platforms.
However, like all coins have two sides, there are positive and not-so-exciting aspects to using Joomla. Some of them are discussed below.
Pros of Joomla:
- Deployment and Out Of the Box Functions: A great strength of Joomla is easy deployment and out of the box functionality. Joomla is very easy to deploy. It comes furnished with an installer script which walks users through the steps of the installation process. Even if you have no knowledge of coding languages, you can set up Joomla and have it ready to go in about ten minutes of time. It also provides great features and functions right out of the box. If you just want a basic CMS site, you do not have to invest time in rigorous configuration and customization. Joomla makes it easy to add content and manage pages, and has a large collection of themes to choose from if you want to change the look and feel.
- Extensions and Support: Joomla thrives on the support of a large worldwide community, which is continually developing extensions and improving on the feature set of the basic Joomla framework. If you want to add a feature to your Joomla site, all it takes is to search for the particular feature extension and add it to Joomla using the built-in extension manager. Support is also widely available, with a large group of Joomla experts always ready to provide answers and solve problems in discussion forums and communities.
- Administration and Modifications: Joomla is a robust and versatile framework. Administrative features are a powerful tool, and can be used to manage most of the features and options in a Joomla site from the administrators control panel. Likewise, for developers with knowledge of PHP/MySQL, it is easy to further customize Joomla to suit particular needs.
- Free and Open Source: Joomla is free and open source software, which means that it can be used cost effectively to achieve whatever purpose you have in mind for your website.
Cons of Joomla:
- Fragmentation and Compatibility: There are many different versions of Joomla, and developers who create new extensions and modules usually create them for whatever version is currently available. It is often found that extensions designed for later versions of Joomla do not work as expected in earlier versions. The absence of backward compatibility can cause problems in some situations. There are no stringent rules which specify that third-party Joomla extensions need to be backward compatible.
- Paid Extensions: Joomla is free, but that does not stop developers who design extensions from wanting to make profit. As of now, some of the most useful extensions for Joomla are paid extensions, which mean you have to make investments to derive their use. Other popular CMS like Drupal or WordPress provide most of their best plugins for free.
- Server Demands: Joomla websites which are large scale and implement a lot of extra features and extensions may take a heavy toll on hosting servers and their parameters, and require a lot of bandwidth for bottleneck-free operation.
- Special Needs: There might be users who want to start Joomla websites and have special requirements. While it is easy to find suitable modules and extensions for most activities, it is like that for very specific needs, it would be difficult finding existing extensions. In these cases, custom extensions need to be developed, which is often expensive.
John Abraham is a Content marketing expert sharing issues, tips, and Joomla solutions through engaging article posts. Stumped on where to find ecommerce solutions to maximize conversions?
Web Developer & SEO Specialist with 15+ years of experience in Open Source Web Development specialized in Joomla & WordPress development. He is also the moderator of this blog "RS Web Solutions".