Joomla CMS Review

Joomla has a distinct name. Joomla is a Free, Open Source CMS developed by the same group that developed the Mambo CMS. It's written in PHP and uses MySQL database server as its back-end storage system. It is highly flexible and configurable for use in a variety of usage scenarios. It can be used to design websites of any level of complexity. Using this CMS lets a website owner separate the design, management and content publishing three different tasks which if done by regular methods of website design, will result in a set of entangled tasks that are different yet glued together with increased complexity. And the user of website is never aware of the CMS working in the background as the navigation system it creates is completely transparent to him. He just sees a normal website.

Joomla provides a number of features to the website administrator to ease out his work. It uses different modules called Managers for different set of tasks. For example, there is a Story Manager which allows the administrator to post, edit, delete, tag and categorize articles from a unified interface. The text editor in the story manager works just like WordPad in Windows and is completely WYSIWYG in nature. Similarly there are different managers for managing media, managing news feeds, RSS and ATOM feed syndication, Polls, etc. There is a facility to search the site made from Joomla built into it. So users can search for contents they are looking for without the publisher having to do anything. And if required, the site owner can specify some pages as help files, which will open in its in built help system. And what’s more, there is a trash manager too, for its obvious reasons.

Two unique features that Joomla provides are Content Display schedule which allows the owner to display different contents based on time and facility to print documents into PDF files. These two features make it stand out of the others. Apart from these there is a very good Advertising Manager module which helps the authors to generate revenue from their site by effectively placing content.

Joomla also supports a plug-in system which makes it highly extensible. It has a huge community of enthusiasts as well as professionals who have developed a great repository of useful plug-ins for it.

Joomla has greatly improved. Updates can now be done through the administrator interface. The newest Joomla will be optimized for mobile phones.