“Message from Jeremy: To all Tech IT Easy readers, who could obviously not necessarily remember the initial announcement, I have invited my friend Steve to help me try to provide you, dear readership, with everyday better technology insights. Steve’s mission statement is that there’s no mission statement: what matters most here is to raise the right issues on underlying market trends, bringing to light new software, Internet services and consumer electronic devices. Steve, the floor is yours…”

OK folks, I must confess this post will surely be of little interest for most of our readers. Nonetheless, I felt like sharing with you a few personal thoughts about world’s leading CMS, Joomla.

To say it in a nutshell, I truly believe that these CMS (content management systems) are quite valuable, and could very well meet a wide success. More powerful than most wikis or blogging platforms, they already power corporate or community websites. Amongst all the existing solutions, Joomla! (formerly Mambo) seems to be more or less the best option, although I can only compare it with WordPress and SPIP, having only a superficial knowledge of Drupal, the most serious contender. Wikipedia lists another 30 platforms, so please feel free to provide us information on those if necessary.

So here I go with ten points, some of them very favourable to Joomla, other being mere pains in the ass. Up to you to make your own overall opinion, mine remaining positive at the end of the day.

Here for the pros :

1) Joomla is both free & fully open-source. Even better, the developers are actually trying to make their little jewel GPL-compliant. Since according to Jeremy, all open-source developers cannot decently work with commercial stuff, that ensures at least a steady support from an important developer community.

2) Joomla has a large, growing user base. So that means: plenty of free advice, forums, feedbacks, suggestions, etc…Many forum threads are so active that should you report a problem, you might expect an answer within the next hours ! Great.

3) Joomla’s modular structure rocks. There are simply billions of additional components and modules available, some of them useless, other being swarmed with bugs, but then the important user base ensures a large documentation thanks to forum+evaluations. What’s more, installing/removing them is piece of cake, and guess what: entries on the database are kept, so you do not need to bother backuping/restoring the SQL database if you just feel like removing a component for a better one, then change your mind. (I have done this like 10K times. Maybe I am not well organized, though).

4) Security issues are now (fairly well) dealt with. OK, some security breaches are corrected every month or two, which is not very engaging. Nonetheless, Joomla’s latest version now tells you when you compromise your site security with risky settings (ever heard about chmod, globals.php…?). This is just plain cool.

5) Joomla’s administrator interface is damn good. Ever tried SPIP ? Well, its interface compares to Joomla pretty much like Windows 3.0′s compares to Ubuntu+Beryl (or Mac OS X, of course Vincent+Kari:-). Besides it is handy : while WordPress is OK, and may be slightly more straightforward, I am quite sure it could not handle dozens of additional modules in its current form, while Joomla ‘s usability would seem unaffected.

6) Templates are great. A single site can handle multiple templates, and each of thoses are quite easily customizable. Don’t bother too much though: hundreds of really nice templates have been designed, just make your choice…Drupal and WordPress lag far behind there.

And the cons:

7) Online documentation is poor. Really, there are many things you ought to find out by yourself. Hopefully, forums are flooded with help topics (see point 2). But it’s not really the way one should proceed, right.

8 ) Installation is tough. Very tough sometimes, depending on your server. Of all the solutions I know, only MediaWiki can compete in terms of complexity – which is stupid since some wiki solutions are just as useful, without any hassle about Apache configuration, PHP/mySQL and all that jazz (PBWiki for eample). Anyway, I guess it’s the price to pay for running such a powerful software.

9) Upgrading from Mambo to Joomla is painful. Which is surprising since the source code is almost exactly the same. Nevertheless, you’ll have to reinstall all components and fiddle with some files (.htaccess, etc…). Not very user-friendly…

10) SEO is an absolute nightmare. This will be the subject of a forthcoming post….

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