Joomla
July 17th, 2006
Continuing my review of the numerous CMS/publishing sysems available I've now progressed to Joomla. I was planning on writing up Movable Type but it still isn't working properly. Remember that this is part of a series and the following have already been written up: Drupal, Wordpress, Textpattern and Symphony. But without further ado lets launch into Joomla...
This is a "part 3", following on from my previous entries on CMS':
Drupal
Wordpress
Textpattern
Symphony
Joomla
Joomla is a system I've heard quite a lot about but just never really used for one reason or another. I have however been playing with it for the past week and I must say it's really not bad at all!
Requirements
The requirements for Joomla are very minimal, all you need is:
PHP 4.2.x or above
MySQL 3.23.x or above
Apache 1.13.19 or above
MySQL, XML and Zlib support should be built into your PHP.
Installation
Installation was an absolute breeze! Just upload all of the joomla files and then run the installer script. As can be seen in the screenshot on the right, a pre-installation check comes up and lists all of the recommended settings and what you're current settings actually are. This is far better than just being shown an error page as it visually allows you to see exactly where the problems lie.
Admin Interface
The admin interface of Joomla is bright and colourful and for the most part is fairly well layed out. There were one or two things that irked me about it but they're just personal things that I'm used too and I dare say if I were using it over a period of time I would get used to it. On a whole though it's excellent to use and easy to manage your site with joomla.
Extensibility
Joomla has extensions which can be used to add additional functionality to the base install. These vary from site statistics, calendars and even a way to integrate a gallery. At the time of writing there are 663 extensions available to the (fairly large) Joomla community and many of them are of very high quality.
Themes
Truth be told I didn't really find much in the way of themes available for Joomla. So it's a question of editing the default theme that comes with the base installation of Joomla. It looks identical to the Joomla site and shows off a lot of the available functionality so it's certainly a good starting point!
Performance
The performance of Joomla has been excellent! I managed to convert a database I have with 5000 entries in it to Joomla and it still continued to fly by. It doesn't have all the advanced caching that, say Drupal does, but it's certainly no slouch in the performance department even under load.
Overall
Overall Joomla is pretty good. It's simple to use installer makes it friendly to all users and the minial requirements means you won't need anything special from your server in order to install it. It has a good choice of extensions and the community is quite active so I would expect the number to increase frequently. For new users the most unfriendly part would be the lack of themes (that's what I found anyway). It's not really a big deal for myself but if someone is using the system who isn't experienced in web design then it's clearly going to present a challenge. Regardless, still a very good choice although it doesn't rank as highly as Symphony or Drupal for me.
