If you are building a website today and you are looking for a CMS to use, you probably in that group of thousands who are asking Drupal vs. WordPress vs. Joomla. All three platforms are excellent choices because they are capable of building websites that are powerful, eye-catching, effective and scalable. In fact, it is reason why 72% of world’s website are built on one of these three platforms. But, for the purpose of this discussion, we are going to focus on Joomla.
Joomla is an open source platform that is based on PHP and uses MySQL for its database. Since Joomla’s release in 2005, millions of websites have used it worldwide in variety of industries to build websites including Fortune 500 companies, educational organizations, entertainment, government, health, and technology. Like WordPress and Drupal, Joomla has a huge open source community with millions of contributors working together to provide support to users as well as improve the platform. I think it is fair to say that Joomla is combination of both WordPress and Drupal as it functionality and feature set captures a bit of both.
There are a lot of opinion pieces on the web about Joomla and sometimes it is difficult to make sense of it all. My goal with article is to simply things a bit and hopefully help you see why Joomla is a great choice. Of the 3 CMS’s, Joomla was the last one to be released and came from the Mambo project. Today, even though is the youngest of the 3 powerhouses, Joomla is second most used CMS for building website globally behind only WordPress.
Let’s talk about some key areas.
Ease of Use
Joomla offers one of the easiest ways to edit and manage content when compared to other CMS’s. Organizing and locating content is a breeze with this CMS. Editing content is just as easy with the Microsoft Word like content editor that is part of system. There are also several third-party professional editing plugins that can be installed to enhance this process.
In addition, Joomla does a great job of managing data integrity. The platform locks content and any properties associated with it when someone is editing that piece of content. Two users are not able to edit the same article or page at the same time avoiding conflicts and discrepancies.
Powerful Menu Creation System
Out of the box, Joomla comes with a powerful and versatile menu creation system that neither WordPress or Drupal can match. Whether you are an inexperience user or non-programmer, you can easily create multiple menus for a site with varying levels of complexity for both internal and external content. A Joomla administrator can even restrict menu item based on user type – public vs registered user.
SEO Friendly
When it comes CMS’s being SEO Friendly, WordPress wins this race hands down, but Joomla is no slouch in this area. SEF (Search Engine Friendly) URLs are built-in in Joomla and you need to do is turn it on. This is important because a website’s SEO ranking is significantly affected by how relevant the URL’s are to content of the page it is associated with. In addition, Joomla allows you to explicitly set the meta description and the meta keywords of every page, further boosting your SEO ranking. If you are running a website, the ability to do is worth it’s weight in gold.
Built-in Caching
Joomla’s cache is one of the most important features of Joomla. This feature makes a Joomla website much faster and much more efficient and it lightens the load on the hosting server. This feature comes enabled out of the box and should remain that way for your website. Quick Tip: If you aren’t an experienced Joomla professional and you are performing your own debugging, you should always disable the caching before starting the debug. Just remember to re-enable it when you are done.
Multilanguage Support
This is another powerful feature that Joomla offer out of the box. Unlike WordPress or Drupal, Multi-language support is built into Joomla as a part of its core. No third-party plugin necessary. This is huge win for any organization that is running a site in multiple countries.
Multisite Support
Joomla comes with the ability to manage multiple site and databases under a single installation. This is powerful feature for companies that have secondary business lines or manages brand specific websites as a part of its marketing effort.
Joomla is Secure
Joomla is a highly secure platform. The administrators of the platform take a proactive approach to keeping Joomla safe and respond quick to release patches when new vulnerabilities are discovered. No platform is 100% secure. There are several things that can and should be done to further bolster the security of your Joomla site. Some of those things are:
- Install a verified Joomla Security Extension. There are several options, so some research on what is right for your site.
- User Smart Usernames and Passwords
- Protect Administrator login by installing admin plugin tools to hide the Admin section login.
- Stay on top of Updates – outdated core files or extensions is one of the main causes of hacker exploits on a site.
There are so many great things to talk about when it comes to Joomla, my goal with this article was to highlight somethings that were important when considering the platform as an option. As always, the needs of organization or person creating a website dictates the platform that fits best. If you are planning to build a website that is blogging focused, WordPress is your best choice. While both Joomla and Drupal can both be used for blogging, it is just WordPress’ wheelhouse. That said, if you are building a site for any other reason, Joomla is a great choice and one you won’t regret. The platform is highly extendible due to huge repository of extension and highly scalable.
And finally, I could not close this article without mentioning one of the most awesome support communities that you could have behind a platform. This community continues to drive this award-winning platform to next level and is always there for you when you run into a jam or have a question. For this community, you’ve got questions – they’ve got answers.
