Joomla CMS

Joomla is a popular, free and open-source content management system that is designed for medium-sized websites. The word "Joomla" is Swahili for "all together!", and that phrase clearly symbolises the philosophy and structure of this CMS.

Joomla differs from WordPress in that it is designed for more complex sites. While WordPress can be extended to do almost anything, from running an online magazine to a fully featured web store, it is a blogging platform at heart. Joomla, on the other hand, is designed from the ground up to cope with those more complex sites.

Joomla's admin panel can be quite intimidating for new users, especially ones who are used to working with WordPress and its simple post and page structure. However, once you become familiar with the terminology used by Joomla, you will soon realise that the two content management systems work with content in fairly similar ways.

Joomla relies on Articles and Components to manage content. Your content is linked to menus using a range of different menu items. A menu item could link to a category, an article, an extension or some off-site content. At first, this sounds like an overly complex way of doing things, but in many ways it is a much more streamlined way of working than the shortcodes used by WordPress to add content.

Just as WordPress can be extended with plug-ins, Joomla is extensible via components, modules and plug-ins. You can obtain these extensions from the Joomla Extensions Directory. Joomla is an open-source platform, and it has a large number of users producing themes and extensions for it. However, the community is not as large as the WordPress one and this means that there are some niches that are slightly lacking. Most people are able to find what they want and get support with any problems that they encounter, but the difference in the sizes of the two communities is noticeable at times.

The main drawbacks of using Joomla for enterprise level solutions, are that it is a primary target for hackers. A major plug-in was hacked in 2014 putting more than 3 million websites at risk. It is also not SEO friendly and needs a plug-in to help with this. There are also speed issues on larger sized sites and the system has no official support.