Joomla Tips

Advantages and Disadvantages of Joomla CMS Development

admin — Sat, 05 May 2012 00:00:38 +0000

Joomla is the most popular content management systems available. Joomla helps you keep track of your web content. It is the best ever CMS available in the world. Joomla is the latest technology in the web development community. Joomla has some advantages and disadvantage as well.

Let’s see some advantages of Joomla CMS Development.

Opensource

Joomla is an opensource so its license is available free of cost. You can get source code free of cost and use and reuse it as per your needs. This way it saves your initial investment and totally reduce your project cost for Joomla CMS development.

Multipurpose Use

You can use Joomla CMS development for various purposes. You can develop small websites for small business owners. You can develop Joomla websites for large corporate use and It gives you plenty of functions and features to combat the situation. It can also use for government applications and organisational websites. You can use it for personal websites, community portal as well as online publications like magazines and news papers.

Easy to Use
Joomla is design for easy installation and set up. It doesn’t need users to have complicated process and advance knowledge of web development as it take only few clicks and voila! software is installed! Its set up is automatic. It is easy to use and anybody can add, edit or delete the content on CMS development powered websites. It needs no prior knowledge of web development.

Templates and Themes
There are thousands of templates and themes available for CMS development. You just install Joomla and do some minor modifications to suit your requirements and start your online presence immediately. Templates give plenty of options to choose so you can select the one which is nearly suit to your requirements. There are various themes available for Joomla CMS development and you can select any for your Joomla website which is best of your tastes.

Easy Migration
It can be easily migrated to any server and most of them can work with any database.

Large Community

Joomla has vast community support and you can get regular update from the community. You can ask questions get answer and much more with community. You can solve your problems and technical difficulties with the Joomla community.

Disadvantage
Joomla has very few disadvantage and they are:

Joomla requires certain plug-ins for certain script.
Customization is limited.
There is big learning curve means difficult to learn.
It is heavy for simple and small websites.
You can not allocate different pages to different CSS when you use Joomla CMS development.
You have to hire a developer for configuring the CMS.

Three Types of Content Management Systems (CMS)

admin — Sat, 05 May 2012 00:00:22 +0000

So why is a Content Management System so important? There are a number of systems to manage websites with and most web designers will offer the best CMS that suits your needs. Some offer unique tools to use on your site, others are designed to enable the website owner to easily make changes to the content of their site as and when they wish. This is aimed at those who may not have strong I.T skills or not feel confident making any changes. They are really simple to use and they can help you make your site professional, unique and ultimately a success. It’s important to choose a good reliable CMS as they important functions such as Security of website and also the Managing Servers, so you need a quick reliable server which will enable you site to run with no problems. The most popular CMS are probably the 3 shown below:

Drupal - this is an open source content management platform powering millions of websites and applications. It’s built, used, and supported by an active and diverse community of people around the world. You can use Drupal to build everything from personal blogs to enterprise applications. Thousands of add-on modules and designs let you build any site you can imagine. Drupal is free, flexible, robust and constantly being improved by hundreds of thousands of passionate people from all over the world.
Joomla - Joomla is the world’s most popular open source CMS (content management system). With 2.7 per cent of the Web running on Joomla, the software is used by individuals, small & medium-sized businesses, and large organizations worldwide to easily create & build a variety of websites & web-enabled applications.
WordPress - WordPress is web software you can use to create a beautiful website or blog. We like to say that WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time. The core software is built by hundreds of community volunteers, and when you’re ready for more there are thousands of plugins and themes available to transform your site into almost anything you can imagine. Over 25 million people have chosen WordPress and its popularity makes it the most popular CMS on the internet. Those who are not sure what CMS to use should use this statistic as WordPress is very easy to use as one feature is you can edit without having to use HTML code.

These are the main systems used but there are many others out there. But best to speak to your web designer to see which one they would recommend for your site and also which one they believe would be best for you. If you’re not very confident with I.T but still want to be able to have an active part in your websites design, layout and future changes then choosing a CMS that you feel comfortable with it important. But there are also so many support features that come with these CMS that you’re never far away from someone who can help.

Drupal vs Joomla vs WordPress

admin — Sat, 05 May 2012 00:00:01 +0000

It didn’t take long for companies and developers to realize that there needed to be a way for non-technical people to contribute content to and update content on a web site. This is where a content management system (CMS) wins the day. Simply put, content management systems store the actual web content inside a database. This allows non-technical personnel to type in a form to create new pages. The content management system handles the details of making sure the right widgets, themes and other aspects of the web site get applied to the new content.

There are currently 3 main open source content management systems written in PHP. Each one has a slightly different focus and as a result, each has strengths and weaknesses that make it more or less suitable for building certain types of web sites. A smart web developer will be familiar with all three while perhaps focusing on in-depth work with one or two. The three systems are Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress. Let’s take a brief look at each and its strengths and weaknesses.

Drupal
Drupal is a system built on PHP and MySQL with web developers in mind. As a result, it tends to be more technical than say WordPress, which makes it easy for relative beginners to get started building web sites. Drupal’s administration interface is rather clunky and it doesn’t have many of the WYSIWYG features of WordPress. This also makes the visual design of a Drupal site much harder which is why Drupal is often a favorite of developers and not designers.

What Drupal lacks in ease of use, however, it makes up for in power. The system is very extensible and customizable. It has a much more robust navigation system which makes it easier to create the URL structure you want. Much like Joomla, there are many, many extensions and modules available for Drupal.

Drupal is also capable of running many web sites from a single installation. This is a very useful feature for creating campaign sites or a group of related sites. Drupal’s features for running multiple sites are much better than the multi-user options in WordPress.

Drupal has a strong set of community oriented features which have made it a very popular CMS for non-profits seeking to build communities around their web sites. Many of Drupal’s extensions and modules are free for non-profit use which is great unless you happen to be building a commercial site on Drupal.

Joomla
Joomla is built and designed as a content management system. It uses MySQL as its database. Joomla does an excellent job of breaking content into highly developed modules such as calendars, polls, etc. Some modules are more fully developed than others. At present, the blogging capabilities of Joomla are relatively weak and in my opinion cannot hold a candle to WordPress.

Joomla tends to be used more often by personal small business web sites and non-community sites. Joomla does not have as strong of user interaction features as WordPress and the blogging element is much weaker in Joomla. As a result, it tends to be used for magazine web sites where user interaction is limited, small business informational web sites and ecommerce web sites.

Joomla’s installation system is as foolproof as any installation system can get. It’s really quick and easy to deploy. Once deployed Joomla can be extended with a wide array of extensions. Unfortunately, many of the best extensions must be purchased. I’ve also found that out of the box, Joomla’s functionality is somewhat limited and it takes a bit of experimentation and learning to really understand how to apply Joomla.

Joomla’s user roles and permissions system is somewhat limited and I’ve seen a number of people criticize it for that. However, I haven’t noticed Joomla’s roles and permissions to be any more limited than WordPress. Overall, Joomla is a powerful platform and a strong CMS but with that power comes a steeper learning curve for developers working with Joomla.

WordPress
You may be surprised to find WordPress listed primarily as a blogging platform. However, the wide variety of plugins available and the incredible flexibility of WordPress has led to many people using it as a simple content management site. WordPress is surprisingly capable as a CMS in this regard and there are many examples of non-blog web sites being built with WordPress.

Where WordPress really shines as a CMS is sites which have a mix of static and episodic content. This could include small company web sites that feature a blog, web magazines, product review web sites, and art gallery sites. As a blogging platform, WordPress has built-in community and interaction features that make it an ideal CMS for building interactive and community oriented web sites. While there are ecommerce plugins available for WordPress (and it has certainly been used successfully to build ecommerce sites), it works best with ecommerce sites that have elements of a blog and community interaction. This makes it a favorite CMS for many artisans and craftspeople.

A big strength of WordPress is its incredible ease of use and wide array of plugins and themes. WordPress is very simple to install. With version 3, WordPress has also created one of the simplest systems for upgrading your system. Most plugins and even the core WordPress code can be upgraded through the web-based dashboard. WordPress also has the largest amount of “ready-to-go” functionality out of the box.

There really is not one clear winner when it comes to selecting an open source CMS. Each of these systems has its own strengths and weaknesses. It is more important to select the best CMS for the type of web site being built and to select the CMS with which you, as a developer, are most comfortable working. I personally prefer WordPress and use it the most. However, this also reflects that many of my clients are small companies that want to build a community around regularly published content. For a different class of clients and needs, I would likely use a different tool. Which CMS do you prefer?