Joomla

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.