Introduction to Joomla
Back in the days when Content Management Systems were not in existence, creating and updating a web portal, news site or other types of websites were a pain for the developers. They had to spend a lot of time learning the languages of web development and spend a lot of time writing code to get the site made. With CMSs like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal, web development has become more or less a cakewalk comparatively.
Not only you can develop an entire website without having to write a single line of code, but you can also do it without compromising on the quality, security, complexity, and features. In this article, we will be discussing Joomla, an open source Content Management System to create websites.
What is Joomla?
In a nutshell, Joomla is an open source – meaning free to use and customize – content management system that lets you create websites and web applications without having to write code from scratch. It connects with a database such as MySQL or PostgreSQL etc. to make content management easy, generate Web Pages and store & retrieve data. It was launched in 2005 and it has been awarded the Packt Open Source Content Management System award thrice.
Some of the big names that use Joomla are iHop, MTV and Harvard.
Key Features
Now that you know what Joomla is, let’s take a look at some important features of this CMS:
- Management of Content: It helps in creating and publishing content on the web browser. The posted articles can be organized in any way the user wants; it supports WYSIWYG type of content creation where you can see how it will look before it actually goes online.
- User Management: Joomla supports the creation of multiple user accounts. These accounts have multiple user level so that only an Admin can make a drastic change to the site. Joomla supports OpenID, Gmail, and LDAP for authentication too.
- Media Manager: Media Manager in Joomla allows users to skip using FTP to upload media to the site. Folders can be created to better categorize the content of the media. This media can then be embedded to the pages for easy viewing without having to be downloaded by the visitor.
- Supports for Templates: Templates in Joomla play an important role in defining how your sites will look. You can get templates from third parties too and once added to the site, you can apply a template sitewide or just for one section of the site.
- Banner Management: Joomla supports setting up of banners and other ads. Once configured you can do a number of clicks, impressions and set up any special URLs if you need to.
- RSS: RSS stands, for Rich Site Summary and it allows a visitor to subscribe to your website and see if there is new content on the site from an RSS Reader. Joomla has full support for burning feeds for users and integrating feeds to post the same content on the website itself.
Why do People Use Joomla?
The reason is actually simple it’s easy and it’s powerful. While WordPress is also simple to use and customize, with this, the developer has a ton of flexibility and customizability. The modules in Joomla can be enabled and disabled in the installation as needed. Joomla is more secure than other CMSs too.
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Templates also play a key role in Joomla, if you don’t like the look of the site, other templates can be installed from various sources on the internet. This saves time in designing the front end of the site.
Advantages and Disadvantages
We will highlight some advantages and disadvantages Joomla has.
Advantages:
- This is easy to install and setup. Compared to installing something like Drupal, you will have a much easier time.
- It supports the installation of plugins to extend its feature set. These plugins are both paid and free and you can set them from Official Joomla repository or from one of the many Joomla plugin sites.
- It has great user control options enabling you to allow or disallow features of the site for users.
- Updating the CMS does not require any special software or digging through code.
- These have easy options to create hierarchies so that you can navigate through the site easily even if It has thousands of pages.
Disadvantages:
- Compared to WordPress, Vix or Blogspot, getting to grips with Joomla is relatively more complex.
- Adding more and more modules and templates increase the load on your server resources and it can impact its efficiency.
- Compared to WordPress, the number of plugins for Joomla is low to add insult to the injury, you will find that while there may be a free WordPress plugin for your task, the Joomla counterpart is a paid one.
- It may have some plugin compatibility issues. If you face one with your site, you will have to spend some time with the PHP code to solve it.
- This is the second most used CMS in the world, this makes it one of the easy targets of automated attacks to websites.
Career in Development
Web Development in terms of career options is one of the growing fields. If you want to get into it, having knowledge of Joomla will only be beneficial. Considering Joomla is the second most used CMS on the Internet, you will find a ton of clients that need a site made in Joomla.
It has other career opportunities from plain development of sites too. Someone good at Joomla and programming languages can create plugins and templates to sell them on the internet too. Unsurprisingly, the demand for polished plugins and templates to customize and adapt the Joomla site to fit different needs is quite high.
Conclusion
As you can see, Joomla is one good CMS that, once mastered, will only enhance your web development skill. Not only you will be able to work on and understand a CMS other than WordPress you will also be able to create websites on a more flexible and powerful platform.
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