Joomla is a free content management system (CMS) that is second only to WordPress in terms of mass distribution. It is also often compared CMS Drupal vs Joomla. This open-source platform is suitable for deploying almost any site in terms of scale and functionality. A wide range of basic features is available immediately after download. A huge number of plugins allow you to adapt the engine to any specific task. Creating websites with a Joomla developer does not require knowledge of web development at all. Therefore, this platform is recommended for those who plan to make a website on their own. Read to the end and you will learn about all the features, functionality, pros, and cons of the platform.
Features of the Joomla engine
Joomla is a fully open-source CMS. This allows every interested specialist to develop their own extensions to solve certain technical, marketing, and visual problems. Plugins can be sold or redistributed for free. Thanks to the most simple and logical interface, Joomla is recommended for people who plan to make their first site on their own. The engine is licensed under the GNU GPL, which allows it to be freely distributed and used. Plugins can be paid for, but they are inexpensive or often have a free alternative. The flexibility of the platform allows you to create projects of various sizes and types. On the basis of Joomla, good landings, online stores, entertainment portals, and corporate and news sites are obtained.
Installation Features
The process of installing CMS for Joomla websites is as simple as possible. There are a lot of step-by-step instructions and videos on the Internet, but often even such supporting materials are not needed. Many providers provide their hosting with an automatic installation of Joomla. In this case, the installation process will take only a few minutes. That is, to create a full-fledged site on Joomla, you just need to rent hosting, buy a domain name and spend a couple of hours.
CMS functionality
The engine really has a lot of functions, so for the sake of review, we divided them into basic and additional features.
Basic functions of Joomla
The content management system allows you to create up to 9 user groups with different rights. This allows you to conveniently distribute powers between the administrator, moderators, managers, ordinary employees, and other categories of users.
The built-in media manager provides convenient management of materials on the site. It can be supplemented with special plugins that will track and analyze the user experience of interacting with materials.
An internal filter with the ability to configure filters provides convenient surfing on the site. With it, you can find and group materials by topic, date added, topic, popularity, etc. The standard menu module can be easily customized to any number of main and sublevels. The Joomla developer can add tabs and drop-down lists without restrictions.
The CMS provides various blocks for integrating feedback forms, advertising, product comparison, and other purposes into the site.
The engine has its own graphics and text editor. These are quite powerful tools for creating high-quality structured and attractive materials. And all this is available “out of the box”, that is, free of charge and without the need to install modules.
Additional features of the Joomla developer
Additional features are implemented using various plugins. The basic version of the CMS is quite advanced. But usually, the development and development of a web project is not complete without the use of third-party modules. With the help of extensions, you can protect your site from hacking and spam, implement automatic backups, perform search engine optimization, and solve many other issues.
Is there an alternative to modules?
Since Joomla is completely open-source, theoretically almost all additional features can be added by editing the original template. For example, the Yandex analytics counter can be inserted directly into the site code. But such interventions require professional programming skills. Therefore, this approach to expanding the basic functionality of CMS is not suitable for everyone. You can also find out more information about Joomla developer.
Advantages and disadvantages of Joomla development company
In terms of features, Joomla is a cross between WordPress and Drupal. Unlike CMS Drupal, which was created for developers, Joomla is more convenient for ordinary users. However, out of the box, it has many more tools for working with the site than WordPress. Maintenance Joomla took care of the convenience of their users, but let’s look at both the pros and cons of applications.
Benefits of the Joomla engine
Open source Joomla websites
Joomla is an open-source platform that you can modify and redistribute without paying royalties.
Electronic commerce
Joomla also has a number of add-ons for e-commerce, which will allow you to manage the product and site content at the same time. If you need to develop a small site for e-commerce, then Joomla will come in handy.
Despite the existing number of popular add-ons that make an online store out of Joomla, we recommend using CMS originally developed for e-commerce, because. their architecture is designed specifically for an online store, and the modules available “out of the box” usually outperform the “Joomla + online store module” assembly in terms of functionality.
Ease of working with structure and content
By editing the structure and content of a site created with Joomla, you will not encounter serious obstacles, it is more like working with files in a Word text editor. Moving away from being a developer
Although Joomla is more complex than WordPress, you don’t need to be a developer to master this platform. The training period is relatively short, which means that even a person who has no knowledge in the field of web development is able to learn how to manage a site in just 3-5 days.
Disadvantages of CMS Joomla
Harder to learn than “lightweight” CMS. As we noted above, Joomla is harder to use than WordPress. This makes it difficult to integrate, for example, your own design into the site structure without the intervention of a web developer. However, the site content management procedure will not take you much time.
A limited number of add-ons
Compared to WordPress, the Joomla plug-in and add-on market does not provide users with such an extensive choice of add-ons and design templates. If you are looking for additional software modules to improve your own site, then get ready that finding and setting up such extensions for Joomla is a time-consuming process.
Disadvantages of Joomla developer for an online store
Despite the fact that Joomla has a number of add-ons made for e-commerce (JoomShopping, Virtuemart), we do not recommend using this CMS to create an online store. Even if we discard the shortcomings of the modules that turn Joomla into an online store, there will be a lot of small and large improvements. If specialized engines (from free ones – OpenCart or Prestashop) initially have all the functionality for the operation of the store, then the search and implementation of obviously necessary modules in Joomla (delivery and payment methods, buyer field settings, similar products, etc.) will take much more time and money.
Joomla is one of the popular content management systems for the site, which also has a large community that is ready to help solve problems and provide good advice.
Despite this, we are not of the opinion that universal CMS platforms are a good solution. Therefore, not every user is recommended to choose Joomla. Platforms like Drupal, WordPress (from free ones), or specialized paid software solutions are much more preferable (UMI, Bitrix). If you need help choosing a CMS, write the desired requirements for the site engine in the comments.
