Joomla reviews

Joomla is a complete CMS that has default features that work as promised without the need of external plugins. Unlike Wordpress, Joomla can be kept with a minimum of plugins and components reducing the risk of a security gap.

You can get really good plugins done by people who love what they do and most of them are even free and perform at top level.

There are some aspects I really don't like about Joomla and the first one is the access control ACL. It's pretty tricky and sometimes I've messed up a whole site just because I checked the wrong box and locked me out of my own development.

I do not use the templates as I find the modules positions messy and kind of boring to use, I always use YooTheme over Joomla as a template and this is magic in motion.

Joomla is pretty easy to explain to clients but there are some procedures that need to be explained several times, as the menu items, the aliases, modules, the redirections and some other stuff that could be even friendlier

I love being able to create a website without additional plug-in installations or extensions. Joomla core has built-in features and capabilities to make a simpler website.

I like better visibility and management of articles and categories in administration.

I like the ability to use multiple templates on one website.

I like the ability to, for almost everything, make an override via the menu.

And what I like most is that I have complete control over the website from start to finish.

What I don’t like the most is that the process of upgrading to a new version can be problematic for people who have no experience with Joomla. I am not thinking here of the update process but of the upgrade. Eg. from Joomla 3 to Joomla 4.

But the online community is great and always helps, and there are a number of instructions so everything can be solved even if you get stuck.

Joomla is an open-source PHP/MySQL based CMS. This lets it be very customizable and there are a lot of resources online through community support to get documentation and help with changes and such. It does have a lot of features and you can spend a lot of time figuring out how to manage Joomla.

It doe feel a bit clunky and not straight forward. Something as simple as creating a content page can be confusing at first glance. My experience with customizing templates was that it is more difficult than other competing CMS options, but as with many PHP-based solutions there is a good community to help if you get stuck if you ask the right questions.

Joomla was the very first CMS I ever used. Being open source doesn't hurt, as it's always updating and evolving. The biggest pro for this product is that you have an enormous extensions catalog, both free and paid, which means you can create a one of a kind website.

For me the same thing that makes it great, is also the same thing that makes it less great. With Joomla being updated quite often, it happens often when extensions fail to update as quickly as the CMS itself, which renders them inactive until updated. Plus, there is a learning curve to working with Joomla, and it doesn't take long to forget which extension controls what element of the site.

It is like a blank slate, where you can create almost any kind of website that you require. It has a very robust user management tool which lets you assign and coordinate a hierarchy of control and access.

It could be very complex, distinguish between modules, plugins and components are not always clear for the users. And having to do things in different places based on what you do, makes things even worst. So it requires a lot of documentation after the work is done.

I cannot find many good things about Joomla, the only one I can think at this moment is that it is FREE and the community has grown over the years.

How can I start? Well, the CMS is very, very complicated to use. I created some websites with Joomla, but I regret it. There aren't many people creating Premium plugins and there are some FREE plugins but sometimes get unsupported. The way the whole CMS works is outdated, clunky and difficult to use.

Issue tracker
Template Variety
Ease of customization

Free Plugins and add-ons - not enough
Lack of major updates

Functionality. It is very modular and has rich functionality

It's complicated. It's not easy to make changes and implement modules.
Many of modules are commercial and is not for free even to try

Functionality, customization options, community

Learning curve, somewhat clunky interface of the backend

It allowed me in the beginning of my business to have customers customize their templates and it did not take long time to implement their websites.

We had a lot of problems using templates for Joomla, and there were times when the CMS end-user interface would stop working. It was hard to fix, and we would have to restore backups in many situations.

I have been using this platform for many years and it is the easiest to use CMS system I have had the chance to try. Great template selections from many outlets and the Open Source aspect makes looking for tweaks easy.

There are constant security updates that you need to be on top of and keeping the version current can be challenging with keeping certain Modules working properly - not a problem if you read up before making the updates.

I came to use Joomla when I needed to build a web based portal for my company to organize internal resources and data. While I can't call myself a Linux guru, it really took me 15 minutes to get my initial Joomla website up and running. Instructions are very clear and simple. Joomla was my first CMS product to evaluate. While it did take me a couple of days to understand it's structure, from that point, building a website was as easy as 123. Everything is visual. You don't have to be a great programmer / web developer to get along with this product. With the amount of available free and paid plugins, sky is really your limit to your web site customization. While my website was fairly simple (as that's the way I wanted to have it), I've seen examples of very complex high end websites, built on Joomla. My favorite feature is a backup. It so happened several times, that I managed to break my website. Restoring from a backup and going back live was so easy, it was hard to believe. Provided this was a totally free solution (Ubuntu Linux + Joomla CMS), I couldn't ask for a better software for my project.

Really nothing. Like I said it did take me a couple of days to understand how to add content and structure it, but once this was figured out, the rest was a breeze.

Joomla! has been around for decades, and the reason for such popularity and continued use is that it is easy-to-use and manage, it is open source and has a huge and active community that maintains it. The community provides extensive documentation, FAQs, and support for almost any question or issue you may encounter.

Joomla! can be set up locally and easy to deploy to the Internet publicly. The security features have significantly improved through the years.

This CMS comes with an intuitive dashboard. And there are many third-party integrations available for setup. Since this is open source, the elements are customizable to suit your needs.

Setting up may require an initial (steep) learning curve. May be not as easy to set up as Wix or Weebly. Hence may require the admin to be more-or-less tech savvy (and not just a beginner).

We use Joomla for our County websites that serve 1 million plus customers. We have a number of staff editors that maintain their specialized content for our 3 local government websites here in Southern California. When working with Joomla, a good template developer is essential and it's important to use a good hosting company for ease of installation and maintenance. We use InspireThemes for our templates and SiteGround as our hosting company. This is a terrific combination as these vendors provide excellent products and superior support.
Joomla is a fantastic CMS for our needs as it provides stability, powerful extensions, room for expansion, and ease of use.

I would strongly advise anyone wanting to use Joomla to start with a Quickstart template with a strong framework built in, like Gantry5 framework. The Quickstart templates save development time and frustration. You can easily install a fresh template in a matter of minutes and then choose your features and away you go!
But use a reliable template developer and a customer service oriented hosting company - VERY IMPORTANT!

Some of things I like about Joomla are, it gives you a lot of freedom to create your own website, with the features and styling you want, or need! Also, there are loads of extensions on the JED (Joomla Extension Directory) so if you want your website to preform a certain function...somebody has probably already built an extension for that. Many of these aforementioned extensions, are either free or low cost. There is also the satisfaction of building your own unique website and knowing that it will be fully responsive accross all devices.

The learning curve is a little steep. While setting up Joomla is relatively easy, getting that polished look of professional sites can take some fiddling, delving into code and tweaking certain parameters etc..

I started using Joomla! 3.1 when I did a course on Open Source Systems whilst unemployed. We were able to choose between Wordpress and Joomla!- and I chose Joomla! because I was already using Blogger, and knew that WP was somewhat similar. I liked the fact that the backend was fairly easy to use for the actual writing part- optimal for beginners. This was similar to what I was used at writing blogposts. I liked that there are many plugins available that integrate smoothly- which tends to be a big problem in Wordpress (many bugs).

For a fair beginner, setting up a server was rather challenging. Also, I am a bit of a design geek- and the "look" of the platform (something I know doesn't deter most programmers) hurt my taste back then. I noticed that this has since improved with version 4, and I am aware that I am being superficial here, and probably not part of the target group- who have different priorities, like usability, extendability, speed etc.

Instead of focusing on Joomla only I tell you why Joomla is a better alternative compared to Wordpress in many scenarios when you are not looking for blog only solution. (Of course when it comes to Blogs there's EasyBlog for Joomla).

WordPress was and is technically inferior compared to Joomla because of
– spaghetti codes
– no multilingual option out of the box
– nor access levels and control
– nor proper menu management (for those with portals to manage 50+ menu items)
– no template, plugin and language overrides (always creating a child theme is really something that shouldn’t exist in the first place)
– nor user groups and a lot of other noes…

The reason Wordpress is still better in many scenarios is thanks to the amazing 3rd party plugin developers (who can rely on the raw purchasing power of myriads of Wordpress users) like Yoast, Woocommerce and multitudes of others and the fast and easy interface.

Since Joomla now have a SEO plugin similar to Yoast (called PWT SEO) there are fewer and fewer reasons not to choose Joomla.

The built-in ACL is excellent, allowing you to easily create user-focused site without adding a ton of plugins. Joomla beats WordPress in user management, menu management, and template management out of the box. There is very little that you can't do with this software.

Many people don't keep the software up-to-date, which leads to security concerns and has given the impression that Joomla is insecure. It's not any more or less than other open source software, but it HAS to be kept up-to-date, and with all open source CMSes security software is a must. SEO isn't quite as easy in Joomla but I hear that's changing with upcoming releases.

If you want to be a web developer, first learn the Joomla and then create your personal or business websites with Joomla. Because Joomla is a flexible platform for the website creators. You can build professional websites and powerful online applications using Joomla. Joomla is a search engine friendly and mobile-friendly content management system.

There are lots of benefits and features of Joomla. I am using Joomla for last few years, and I never faced any problem in Joomla. For me, SEO is very important for my websites, so Joomla always helps me. According to me, there are no cons, Joomla is perfect.

What an I say, this is my addiction! Seriously, I have been using Joomla! for approximately 14 years and have nothing but good things to say about it. First and foremost it is Free and Open Source giving developers an edge when creating Dynamic Websites. Secondly the development team and community behind Joomla! are hands down the best groups of people. Third, the 3rd Party Developer support for Joomla! is excellent with the Extension Directory providing more than 10,000 current integrations and enhancements. Lastly, the ease of use and end user learning is the simpelest compared to other CMS like Wordpress and Drupal. Our end user adoption of Joomla! is 500% faster than any other with less customer call backs than the others. This is great for customers and makes new business generate faster by word of mouth.

Nothing bad to say, one of the best things that has happened to me and my compay.

Joomla is free software therefore we can review it from head to foot without problem and adapt it to
our needs, for this we must have knowledge in php and database, depending on the level of knowledge and the ability to understand foreign source code, you can achieve wonders with Joomla.

My beginnings with Joomla were with version 1.7 and migrating it to 2.5 was quite tedious, so much was
the impact that I decided to forget about the previous version and start a new website, which was a boost perfect to update the design, select a good template and modify it as required;later the migration of 2.5 to 3 following the tutorial of the official page was much more Simple and fast, I had no problems with the database.

Joomla allows the installation of infinities of modules, plugins and extensions that facilitate the work and allow to diversify the page, making it attractive, has extesiones for the management of the security to avoid hacking; changing the language for me was fundamental.

There is a large community to find information about Joomla.In terms of user management and administration, it is very broad, with profiles and groups an important level of security is maintained

The way to classify the articles by categories, allows you to have an organized and clean website.

- If it's a blog what you need to do, I do not recommend using Joomla

- Some plugins or modules can be security holes.

- Also some plugins or modules offer features that you only get if you pay, of course this does not depend directly on Joomla but on the developers of each module, but it can be frustrating when you want to add functionality and you can not pay it.

The things that I like most about Joomla is that it is open source, therefore any one can code freely, there is also a large library of plugis that solve problems and the possibility of working with already designed templates, whether they are paid or free.

Joomla has some things that I do not like and is that it stays behind its competitors, the benefits it has are very simple compared to other content managers, basically its main use is only for websites that are blogs, and so So much is short when it comes to talking about e-commerce sites, the configuration of SEO or positioning is more complicated and less effective than its competitors and besides them it is more complex to use than others with which better results are achieved. It is also good to clarify that in my opinion the library of both paid and free templates are very basic in comparison to the class of websites that we see today.

Many components and plugins are easy to find

This engine is good but only for simple sites

The easiness of content upload, the variety of options, and the compatibility of it with our website.

The design templates could be a little more creative.

It's FREE, It's OPEN SOURCE, It's FASTER, It's SAFER, It's more RELIABLE, It's designed for really smart people for SMART PEOPLE, and it looks better. The styling doesn't look like a deathstar terminal.

Compatibility with certain software packages and hardware due to highly possible dishonest and cowardly development protocols from OTHER COMPANIES.