david meissner

Notes on Joomla

Date: []

A few notes on Joomla.

Pros

  1. Relatively easy to install and operate.
  2. Joomla is actively supported with frequent updates.
  3. The default Cassiopeia theme is an excellent starting point.
  4. There is built-in support for restricting some content to logged-in users.

Concerns

  1. Joomla’s terminology for components is a little non-intuitive; it takes a bit to understand how the modules, menus and content fit together to construct the site.
  2. The documentation tends to be outdated, though still useful. The organization is working on improving the documentation.
  3. The built-in article editor is awkward to use for creating content.
  4. Support is somewhat hit-or-miss. Some questions on the forum are answered quickly, others take longer or go unanswered. This is to be expected when using free software, and in general the forum is fairly responsive.

Details

I manage a Joomla site for a homeowner’s association, and for a while I ran my personal site with it as well. Eventually I decided that Joomla wasn’t a good fit for my personal site, but it works very well for the association site.

I considered Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal when I first created the homeowner site. I didn’t do extensive testing, I just set up a basic installation with each product to get an idea of what would be involved in building the full site.

Wordpress was an obvious default choice, since it’s the most common platform in use. But I’m skeptical of the platform, with all the security issues it’s had, and the recent bad press involving Wordpress and wp-engine doesn’t help.

Wordpress and Drupal have steeper learning curves than Joomla, at least for creating a basic site. Joomla has its own challenges; I found some of the terminology Joomla uses for site components to be a little confusing at first. But it didn’t take me too long to learn the basics by going through the documentation and the sample content.

One important requirement I had was to have some of the site content restricted to association members. Wordpress can do this through third-party plugins, but Joomla has a good access control feature built in to the core product. I’m not sure about Drupal but I think it also requires a third-party plugin for controlling access.

The Joomla article editor is a little awkward to use. It would be great if I could use Markdown, as with Grav and other systems. Alternate editors are available as plugins, but I don’t need to create a lot of content for the site so I just live with the existing editor.

In the end, Joomla provided the features I wanted for the site, without having to install external plugins or themes. I was able to use the default Cassiopeia theme to create a clean-looking, simple site that works well for the association. The site provides a basic login feature that allows only homeowners to see some of the content. And the site has been reasonably easy to update and maintain.