My passion for Joomla! drove me towards the first blog about this technology. There are tons of material available on technical topics online and I wanted to contribute something meaningful. In the current dynamic business ecosystem, as a PHP developer I have had opportunities to work with many CMS and frameworks. Then I thought, in all these years, which has been my most preferred CMS? And the answer was – Joomla!
Today, when everything is managed by software alone, it is not enough just to have a flexible and modular approach in content and codes in a webpage. The CMS needs to deliver on every kind of business needs. After working with Joomla!, I have no doubt in declaring that the CMS is capable of fulfilling any business needs, along with delivering the required flexibility and freedom to developers.
Introduction to Joomla!:
Joomla! is a free and open source content management system (CMS) designed to assist users in building websites and other online applications. It is offered under the General Public License (GPL) version 2.0. Joomla! was created with the intention of creating a free and open-source CMS, as well as a great online community centered on the CMS.
Technical Aspects of Joomla!:
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- Written in PHP, uses object-oriented programming and MVC architecture
- Extensible, tested and benchmarked
- Effective, configurable settings and caching
- Standard coding structure with proper commenting
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Features of Joomla!:
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- User friendly
- Fully customizable layout
- Easy and extensive administration
- Easy templates
- User management feature
- Workflow management features
- Help and documentation for Joomla CMS
- Joomla recently added support for PostgreSQL, as well as commercial offerings such as Microsoft SQL Server, Azure cloud services and Oracle.
- Joomla's latest 3.0 releases deliver out-of-the-box support for mobile users.
- Supports 68 different languages and offers a choice of 10,000 different extensions
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Why Joomla! And not other CMS? Before attempting to put forth my argument, let me state that my opinions are based entirely on my experience and other developers may have different opinions depending upon their own experience, facts or specific expertise.
As I have stated before, I personally prefer Joomla! over all other CMS available in the market. I have used it to develop different kind of websites and web applications. We can modify the code to suit the requirement, if necessary. Numerous extensions are available for free. We can create our own templates, components, modules and plug-ins in a very short time.
The best part I like is template positioning. This means that the user interface which contains HTML, CSS and other code to display specific data is completely separated from the Joomla Logic and is contained entirely within the template system. This gives us greater control over how we wish to display the data without having to access the code. If one module has to be moved from one position to another, then there is no need to play with the code, I can display that data to any position of the template.
When it comes to choosing a CMS for your new website or web project, it's important to consider all factors. Set a clear objective and purpose for your project. Ultimately, the best CMS or framework will be chosen on the required features and functionalities. And for me, more often than not, Joomla! has come to the aid!
