How To Choose The Right CMS

Surprised to see someone hating Joomla. I haven’t personally used it a whole lot, but it seems that a lot of people like it.

Thanks for a great post! I only wish you had posted this 6 months ago when I spent endless hours looking for the right CMS to focus in on. In the end I went with Wordpress, both for its ease of customisation and massive community but not least for the user-friendliness to the people who ultimately are going to be using it. Will revisit Frog though as I recall it looked promising.

Excellet job of breaking this down. I wholeheartedly agree with your post. However, there is one CMS I would like to add to your list: http://pluck-cms.org/

I am currently working with this CMS for my own portfolio site right now. The feature set is pretty small as far as modules and themes go, but the ease of use is about a 9 in my book, and I am usually a Drupal advocate. Additionally, it is easy to theme, requires no database, and has great documentation. I wouldn’t use it for an enterprise level site, but for a lot of folks building their portfolios, or building small sites for “mom’s n pops”, it could have a pretty high ROI.

**Disclaimer**

I am in no way affiliated with PluckCMS or any sponsoring organization. This information is provided purely in the spirit of sharing knowledge with the community.

Interesting thoughts about Joomla. I’ve never liked it either, but also don’t hear much negative about it. I’m checking out the others now – thanks for the research!

Another really simple CMS is Cushy CMS. It’s not really advanced, and there’s no plugins for it, but it is great for really simple sites. Well worth a look.

Awesome article, especially regarding Joomla! Thanks for the read.

I agree – Joomla’s evil. I personally use Wordpress for all my CMS needs. Go Wordpress!

Very nice write up of Content Management Systems.

Oh man, Joomla is horrible. I use Expression Engine for my main blog, I’m surprised it wasn’t on the list. Silverstripe is an excellent open-source CMS. I’m thinking of using it for my design site, just so I know how to use different CMS’s.

OMG, Joomla. *shudders*

hahahaha. I love to hear you say “Joomla is evil”. You are absolutely right. I always discourage my clients not to use joomla too. Thanks for the great post.

Hi,

your mistake-section is great, but the best CMS-section is just crap, sorry!
WordPress is really not a CMS but a blog with some cms possibilities and magento is even less a CMS because it is a 100% ecommerce-thing which allows to publish some static pages which is not really comfortable.

I don’t know from where you are but in Europe, espcially in the German speaking countries, TYPO3 is used very often. It is one of the bigger CMS, Open-Source, but you can turn everything off what you don’t need and so there will be no overhead for the customer and if he needs one time a feature more, you can just turn it on again!

Have a nice day
Georg

I’ve been happy with CushyCMS. I’ve got about 25 clients using it now. There’s nothing to download, and I haven’t had to give a single client a lesson in how to use it.

Drupal is always #1. Good review on the mistakes…

Nice article, a little bit harsh on Joomla! for my liking, but fair enough assessment of its problems.
I still have many clients using Joomla! and they are all happy, but since almost a year I try to use Wordpress as often as I can, just because is much easier to use, for me and for my clients.
Magneto is also a winner for e-commerce websites, I upgraded all my clients that were using Opencommerce to it and I’m very satisfied with the results and how easy is to use.
Cheers.

Hello Depot,

Pretty nice article. Even though from my personal point of view, I don’t think that Joomla is the boogeyman. I’ve been using Joomla for some time now (a few years), and it depends on what do you expect from a CMS.
You are right that finding the right plugin and/or extension can be a pain in the butt, but then again, it depends on how good you are in researching what you’re looking for.
Another quite important aspect of choosing a CMS, is knowing exactly what you want to accomplish, and trying to think in perspective what are your goals for that particular website. If you simply want to blog, Wordpress is the best option. If you want to expand your blog into a portal for example, that you should consider installing a more advanced CMS, and most important if upgrading from one CMS to another CMS what are the options for moving the content (which I find to be very important, but also difficult in some cases).
Sorry for commenting this much, but I thought it would be nice to share .

I totally agree with you conclusions.
I have experience with both Joomla and Frog CMS. Joomla just gets you frustrated the more you use it. It’s not flexible at all and generates crappy html code. Most of the plugins are buggy or have version incompatibility problems.
I converted to Frog CMS (PHP port of Radiant CMS). What a releave! Full flexibility for the developer and non tech savvy clients like the simplicity of the admin interface.

What about a wiki as a CMS?
For example I know that Atlassian push their Confluence enterprise wiki as a great solution for content management, as well as a collaborative platform that naturally a wiki is really all about.

As far as I know it has all the required features, like permissions and so much more. Weird you did not mention wikis as a solution for CMS.

Nice post. I use a CMS called MODx. Not sure if you have heard about it, but it is great for me. The interface is great, clients have used it before training and can start getting content in straight away. In terms of extensions there are a good number, but the important thing is the active forums. The founding members of the CMS are so active on the forums its unbelievable and they are really open to suggestions, they make it clear that the CMS’s direction is shaped by everyone using it. Also people are not using it because thats what they are used to, like I have found with Drupal. Drupal has more extensions than MODx however after using Drupal at work for a year now, I would easily offer MODx over Drupal, because its the core functionality and interface that wins it for me. Because at the end of the day I have had to dop or re-write nearly all the Drupal modules I have used to fit the clients needs. Drupal forums are so bloated with poorly coded modules its a complete nightmare. If you have not used MODx then do so, once you get your head around the terminology you can have a basic site setup in hours. The one thing MODx needs is high profile sites, as its not been around as long as Drupal or Wordpress, I am sure once it has a few high profile users it will become very well known.

I think that the most promising cms is symphony
http://symphony21.com/

take a look

You wrote a nice review, but are you trying to irritate on purpose all us Joomla lovers

The power of Joomla is in its flexibility: You may choose to go with basic installation, but also find from the great collection of extensions your need.

Open Source vs Commercial: It’s changing (http://extensions.joomla.org/rules) and soon only OpenSource extensions are listed.

Wondering why comments are empty and the discussion has moved to Twitter about this review.

Hi,

an interesting article. I run several sites, using some of the content management systems mentioned above. I definitely vote for Drupal – in terms of sheer power, it can’t be matched by any other system.

I have some sites running on SilverStripe. I like it because it is very easy for editors to use – the content management interface is very streamlined. However, it can be confusing at times – certain options which you would expect from the admin interface (and which are available in other systems) can be changed only by directly editing the template files.

As for Joomla, I have some large sites running on Joomla and I actually like it. First of all, I like it for the speed of implementing custom designs – it takes me about 50% less time to code a new skin for Joomla than for Drupal. I also don’t have a problem with its interface for content editing – works fine for me, especially after adding some free modules, like JCE (better editor). The greatest drawback – lack of granular access control. If I am designing a site with several levels of authors, editors etc., then Joomla would not be a good match.

To your list, I would also add CMS Made Simple (http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/) – a very nice CMS system if you need a small to medium website, with some unique advantages.

Yeah! Wordpress <3

I like the article, but you are wrong about Joomla! Really, I build websites with Joomla. It’s all much easier. I can find free modules/components/plugins and much more.

I know that programmers don’t like Joomla, i know!

I’m a designer and I can tell you that I can manage this CMS all by my self.

Best regards,
Andrei.

Great Post!

This is exactly what I needed. Thanks.

However you could have mentioned one more CMS- Pluck http://www.pluck-cms.org/
It doesn’t require a database and you can customise the looks within minutes. Best CMS for very small sites.

I want to promote the excellent CMS “CMS Made Simple” because of the easy installation, easy to use back-end and extremely easy and flexible templating.

http://www.cmsmadesimple.org

Forget all CMS you listed above. Try MODx.

Just have to fully disagree with your evil criticism regarding Joomla. Jealous ?

Maybe you could add umbraco to the list. http://www.umbraco.org
A nice looking and easy to use UI for the backend.
Easy for the developer too.
But it’s not a Php or Ruby CMS like the others in the list. It’s .NET
Helpfull community.

Sorry, but although some of your article has merit, overall it lacks serious objectivity.

I would also add the following observations:

Anyone who is looking for a CMS for a particular purpose should avoid anything labelled as “showing promise” since there is no guarantee that such promise would be fulfilled. A user may invest time, and perhaps money, in such a system only to find themselves with a lame duck at a crucial point in their site’s development.

“Early adopters” of concepts or products the world over are often colloquially referred to as “geeks”. Such could be said of “early adopters” of CMS systems “showing promise” and yet you counsel against “geek friendly” CMSs and suggest avoidance of an “overly simplistic CMS”. Surely any system in the youthful stages of its developement could be categorised as an “overly simplistic CMS” by its very nature as a young platform?

Of your “Top Five Recommendations”:

Drupal has a deserved reputation as a CMS platform, as well as a deserved reputation for relatively poor and proportionately more expensive commercial extensions and support. It is also widely recognised as a system that is more approachable by the tech-savvy developers than the ordinary user.

Wordpress is a solid blogging platform and is excellent at what it does.

Radiant does not show on “Google Trends”, meaning that no-one is performing and Google search on it. The inference from that being it has a [very] small user base. This is borne out by their own web site “continuously improved by a team of core committers with dozens of additional contributions from the Radiant community”. A small number in anyone’s book for something you may want to base an important web presence upon. I’m not dissing Radiant but it’s relative obscurity does not lend itself to mainstream usage (at present)

Magento is an e-commerce (shopping cart) application, plain and simple (and very good at what it does) and does not merit presentation as a CMS at all. Listing Magento as a CMS is even more perverse than doing the same with Wordpress (although this latter is my own opinion only)

Silverstripe has a greater presence than Radiant but even so it still has the “most promising” tag attached to it; see the title of the 2008 Award it received from Packt.

Your final comments against Joomla are, at least, factually flawed but at worst displaying personal bias at the cost of losing objectivity. Let me explain my thoughts:

The extensions listing at joomla.org lists 4367 extensions in some 29 Major categories and a good few more sub-categories. All browsable and all searchable. The HUGE majority of which are free/open source and that includes some of the biggest, mostly widely used and respected extensions for Joomla.

Lastly, the inference in your comment ending “considering the top dollar training offered for the system” is that the core Joomla team have a commercial interest in offering training for Joomla. This is totally untrue and a perverse statement and phraseology used by you. The core Joomla team are staunchly open source and have consistently made moves to marginalise pure commercial interest and peripheral involvement of commercial third-party developers. If you have any doubt about this then I suggest you should research their recent moves relating to trade-mark and web sites with Joomla in their name: in brief, to continue using the Joomla name in a web site’s URL a site must demonstrate a completely non-commercial offering to the Joomla community. This last to be verified by the core Joomla team.

To close, as I said earlier, your article has some initial merit but displays bias and, in my opinion, latterly perhaps an undisclosed personal agenda against Joomla?

I have been using Silverstripe for around 6months now and it’s absolutely fantastic. It’s the only CMS I have come across that really doesn’t get in your way and the Sapphire MVC framework it’s built around makes building sites a really enjoyable experience. Definitely recommended.

you don’t know typo3? – ah. what a pitty, thats the very best CMS ever. http://typo3.org

best regards – alex

Great Article… I also advice everyone to avoid Joomla…

But I think you made a typo

“Take for example the huge amount of people who insist on running *Windows*. I still have no idea why people wish to inflict that kind of pain on themselves.”

Nevertheless a great writeup!

I read this particular statement and almost fell out of my chair:

Just because many people are using a CMS, does not make it good. Take for example the huge amount of people who insist on running Linux. I still have no idea why people wish to inflict that kind of pain on themselves.

But then I read this, and now I forgive you:

Whether you are a big company or small group of freelancers, it is imperative that whoever the Mac guy is among you, sign off on anything that the IT guy presents.

Linux and Unix power the majority of the Internet, most of the CMS on the Internet and even the core of Mac OS X. There are very good Linux graphical interfaces available with features that have been copied by Mac and Windows. Plus there are easy to install versions of Linux and Unix.
I would not consider iWeb to be a CMS. It is more like dreamweaver and frontpage and not made for content collaboration by customers.
I would not consider PHP a web “tool” – just a language and it was not the first server-side scripting language.
I would not consider Joomla to be evil and I would not recommend and CMS that is not version 1 unless you are a good programmer. I would also say that WordPress is good but actually not that simple to customize for non-blog situations. You did not mention ease of installation and hosting of CMS which is a big issue. For example Ruby on Rails needs more hosting horsepower.

I second the Joomla sentiment – 100x.

We wrestled with Joomla for months before switching to Drupal, and we can’t believe the switch. I admit that Drupal is very very good and is tough competition for anyone, but it underlies the fact that Joomla is really clunky, poorly designed [infrastructure], and is terribly frustrating!

An example? Sure.

I remember needing the functionality of a Joomla module. I downloaded it, it broke my site, and I couldn’t get anyone to help me out.

After rebuilding the entire site again (right from a fresh install), I tried a different module that did basically the same thing. This time, I paid 75Euros for the product – which never installed properly. After numerous emails to the company, I got no response, and days later that module broke my site. Go Joomla!

Basically, if you want a blog, forums, a static site, an information site, or almost any other site, Drupal is your friend. I’ve used [and really like] Wordpress, Expression Engine, Plone, and very many other big names, and Drupal blows them all out of the water in terms of ease of use and functionality. Wordpress looks WAY better, but the Drupal team is in the middle of redesigning their standard theme. So look out!

hope this has helped!

if nobody knew Linux we would have no CMS no web no Mac
Everything is supposed to be so easy so nobody has to learn and lift a finger
Really customizing any CMS for a customer is not so simple – I think you should learn 1 or 2 CMS and a couple Ajax libraries, PHP itself and Ruby if you need it for one of your CMS choices

You obviously dont know what you are talking about when you say linux is a pain, Infact I can tell that you not used linux for more than a week. You are giving users the wrong picture without even knowing what the real picture is.

I use linux as my primary OS with no other OS installed and I can proudly say that I LOVE IT.

cushy cms is a commercial HOSTED thing- if you can’t even host a CMS it should not be in same category as joomla drupal etc..
A CMS without a database? Probably not robust
Mageno?? Have you used it? It’s a shopping cart/checkout system – not a CMS at all – unless you mean just for shopping part of a website

drupal vs. Joomla ?
Neither one is easy to use
Both are complex
You should be a programmer to use one effectively or you have help

I agree that Joomla is a big, ugly, hard-to-use CMS. That’s my opinion as a web designer who had to built templates for it for a while, and as a content user for it – it’s just plain confusing in every respect. Drupal’s not far behind – it’s just not intuitive for either side of the user experience, client or designer. WordPress is where my loyalties lie at the moment, but some of the others you’ve listed look pretty interesting si I might check a few out.

We’ve been looking into cms bites which looks like a more flexible hosted cms solution than cushy. Still in beta/invite though

Your rant against joomla is so vicious, I can’t help but feel you had a bad experience. Readers should do more research than just reading this one article.

You seem to have a bias towards simple CMS systems that require no programming knowledge. That’s fine for one-person design shops or do-it-yourselfers, but the trade off is less flexibility and a tendency for sites that all look the same. I’m sure we all can immediately notice the Wordpress sites, for example, or Drupal sites where the developer hasn’t bothered modifying the defaults, sometimes even leaving the drupal favicon.

There are a lot of CMS systems out there. Some are for experts, some for developers, and some for people who don’t have the time or inclination to ‘open the hood’. Why not focus your attention on types of users and what sort of CMS would be good for that application?

I’m a long time user of Wordpress but after looking at FrogCMS… I am sold. Very lean and developer friendly CMS (flexible).

Switch from Wordpress to FrogCMS

Suitable for a small and simple 5-page website to a complex website with blogs and gallery…

I never liked Joomla prior to using it. Now that I am forced to use it by my employer, I dislike it even more. I think it’s just too big and bogs everything down. There are more steps needed to do something that is supposed to be simple. That’s basically what it does… makes the simple complicated. I massively dislike it.

Haven’t tried Drupal, but I’ve used wordpress extensively as a CMS and it is a breeze to use and understand.

I write my own content management systems. I don’t understand using these out-of-the-box solutions that bring along so much clutterware. Sure, it’s convenient to throw something written by someone else into your site. But when it starts acting up or you want certain modifications its a pain in the ass to go through cryptic code just to get something to work how you want. And, no matter how hard you try, you will always be aware of the CMS you are using (I mean that as you log in to edit a post you are confronted by the CMS).

I make my own. I started by fooling around and making one for a personal blog. I then made a better one for a professional blog and then sold the same code to a friend. I now make custom CMSs for clients. It’s tough to begin with, but pays off. Pays off well. If you know what you are doing, do it yourself. If you don’t, then maybe my advice doesn’t work well in your case.

What i currently need is a “non-blog” type of site. Don’t necessarily need comments or community features. Just regular web pages.

I have spent a lot of time learning 3 CMS systems. First was Wordpress. Great at blogs, but it lacks in complex static pages.

So i learned Drupal. Much better with static pages, + it does basic blogs, forums, polls, etc. It has an amazing number of features.

I was set with Drupal until i saw a video tutorial on MODx from nettuts.com. So i spent time learning it. Wow, it’s easily the best of the 3 in terms of static pages. If you need just regular web pages, no matter how complex the layout, MODx is great. And if i’m bringing over an existing .html site, MODx can retain the exact file names, even though the content is pulled form a database. For example, if i currently have mypage.html, MODx can still call the page mypage.html. I don’t think Drupal or WP can do that.

Big Disappointment that you hating Joomla. Right now I using Joomla, Wordpress, Drupal & Magento on my different networks and i’m simple agree with you on Wordpress, Drupal & Magento points but i totally disagree with you on Joomla point.

It might be possible that one’s experience would had been bad with one software that not mean that one should advice others to avoid using it.
Joomla is great in every seance.

Also I’m agree with Brqopa that Magento is e-commerce software, which is quite different from a typical Content Management Systems.

and If we talking about Linux then I dont want to comment about it all as Kumail.H.T already said it all… I start using Linux in my high schools and then i never used windows for any need. Linux and Windows differ in philosophy, cost, ease of use, versatility, and stability. so you cant just say that Linux is a pain. I don’t want to paint a picture for you but you need to re-paint your picture for others.

I’m not intending to rude but you have a great blog and many readers like your writing style like me.

Enough Said !!! Anyway Thanks for the Post with some nice reviews.

Bullshit about Joomla! The point is: if you dont want to mess with a complex CMS…dont touch it! Since Version 1.5 Joomla turned really powerful…the ability to have full control about output, the most powerful (free) extensions available for a CMS and the ability to make it really easy to use (as a customer) is the reason i take joomla for almost every job.

But…nobody is able to use it “out of the box” without any knowledge of HTML, CSS and the Joomla system itself…when you used it a couple of times its the most powerful one in the “middle”-Class of CMS…

All of you must try modX the most promising CMS. I used to play with joomla, but now i prefer modX, beautiful AJAX integration, and endless coding flexibility.

don’t forget, modX it’s the next big THING

Someone has commented that this article is biased and I agree. While I appreciate the intent of the author, I must say that this article does not serve the intended purpose. Someone who disses Linux and an immensely powerful platform like Joomla must get a fresh perspective before setting out to advise the world. Look, the fact is that most CMS are not for lay users. If your great grandmother is going to build or maintain a website, a CMS is not what she needs. If you are going to use a CMS, you need to be prepared for some hard work and research. I have built dozens of sites using Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress and many more systems and I must say Wordpress is the best in its category and Joomla in its own. The “perfect” CMS is a matter of personal opinion and comfort. If a particular system works for you, then that’s all that matters.

I’ve been using joomla for about a year now and I’m a big fan. It has successfully met the needs of multiple clients. My favorite feature has been user management. I do have to admit though, I was just complaining this morning about how lately it seems that every extension I need is commercial.

LOVED your comment about Joomla! It is absolutely the worst piece of software I have ever used. The UI is not intuitive by any means, which negates the whole point in having a CMS – your users need to be able to USE IT!

Its almost impossible to design or code for (compared to Drupal and Wordpress) and none of the standard features make any sense.

You need to sell T-shirts that say “avoid joomla” so we can spread the word.

Great post!

I’ve used numerous different CMS in the search for something that would work for me. I prefer to make my own templates from scratch. Drupal was painful to build my own templates, Joomla (and Mambo) was impossible to style, PHP-Nuke and all the variants were a nightmare…. I found that I kept coming back to Wordpress. While it’s not a “CMS” it contained all the features I was looking for and was extremely easy to style.

Joomla is a wonderful advanced CMS. As with all the professional tools you need to spend some hours reading how to use it.

You say:
>>>”The only way to get the functionality you would ever really need beyond basic content management is to pay large sums of money for commercial modules. The community is huge in the worst possible way. There are a million modules for one problem and it is near impossible to find the right one.”

1. You do not have to pay large sums of money for commercial modules to get the functionality you would ever really need beyond basic content management. Most of the modules a developer will need are free.
Examples:
SEO > sH404sEF
e-Commerce > Virtuemart
Localization > Joomfish

How many of the above CMSs support localization without having to deploy multiple sites for every language?

2. The community is huge in the worst possible way. Untruth. The community is wonderful and in the forums you can get help when you need it.

3. Yes there are many modules for one problem and it is nice to have more than one solution for a specific problem. It is easy to find the best because the modules are rated.

>>>”The interface is deplorable. None of the methods of content management make any sense, and it is obviously not meant to be user friendly considering the top dollar training offered for the system. If there were ever a CMS to avoid, this would be it.”

Yes, the interface is not very user friendly but the developer can install a free module that makes the administration very user friendly. Also you can edit the web site from the front page.

>>>”That’s the end of the list. If you know to avoid Joomla! you’ll know how to avoid anything else that might hinder your experience creating and managing a website. Whew! There! Joomla!”

I have to say that Joomla is a CMS you have to try, especially if you want some advanced features. Also joomla has won many awards like this:

http://www.packtpub.com/article/joomla-wins-best-php-open-source-content-management-system

Well I can see many people are advocating Joomla !! It may be easy for you to manage content over joomla by now but for new guys its always difficult.

As a designer I was not comfortable with the design controls joomla offered for each page. To get a layout done one had to go thought so many pages and do edits.

To be frank I committed Mistake #2 for going with Joomla. My fellow copywriter was all excited about putting down his articles and for that I had to sit and understand joomla for over a month. Everything that we wanted had to be thought w.r.t joomla’s ability. Finally I left all my hope on joomla and developed a small app specifically designed for our requirements.

Until now we could just manage the diversity of content layout needs, but now we wanted a new CMS. So I started my research on Designer Friendly CMS.

My research has almost come to an end and probably going for SilverStripe for its flexible coding and designer friendly.

My personal runner ups are

1. http://www.speaklight.com
+ Greate looks and easy of managing Content
+ Edit live
+ Change layout live and publish
- Hosted service
- Not openSource
- Not sure about extending capabilities.

2. http://www.DOTNETNUKE.com

+ Live edits
+ OpenSource
+ Customizable
- Licence issue

3. http://www.umbraco.org

+ User Friendly
+ ASP.NET
- License issue.

4. http://www.SilverStripe.org

+ OpenSource
+ Licensing
+ User friendly
+ Code less do more
+ More dynamic I should say
- Theme changing needs rewriting code
- We are still testing but I think it will pass

5. Dupal

+ Lightweight
+ Themes are easy to build
- Not as flexible as I wanted

6. Expression Engine
+ Good community
+ User Friendly
-OPenSource ?

Regards,
Siddharth Menon

Great to see the write-up!

We strive to produce an easy-to-use, fluid CMS here in small New Zealand. I’m glad there’s a growing community of people interested in the SilverStripe CMS. We’re always aiming to better ourselves and our product!

If you haven’t yet tried our CMS, please click through to our website and try it for yourself.

Aaron M
Account Manager
SilverStripe

“Just because many people are using a CMS, does not make it good. Take for example the huge amount of people who insist on running Linux. I still have no idea why people wish to inflict that kind of pain on themselves. Similarly, picking a CMS based on a following is an extremely bad idea.”

- so why are you using it? I mean you run apache to run wordpress! I mean Im not sure you really know what you are talking about, why rant on a OS when this is about CMS? Why even write about CMS based on MySQL, if Linux is such a pain?

What makes Joomla evil? Yes its big and bulky but for some purposes or users – its the right choice – it depends on your demands.

Its not a 100% bad article, you got some points, but statements like that just makes me wanna delete webdesignerdepot.com from my newsfetcher.

wow… I’m already a Drupal guy..

and yeah.. I love the frog..

thanks for the great post!

I would strongly agree not to let an “IT” person choose your CMS. The same goes for a “design” person or a “marketing” person. Get yourself a WEB person. Any organization that still believes that Web expertise is an automatic extension of any of the first three or a simple process of adding one of each to a Web team will never realize the maximum potential the Web has to offer. The Web is now a unique and discipline on its own. Read http://www.zeldman.com/2007/07/02/let-there-be-web-divisions/

Also consider one of the many other FREE Content Management Systems that work right out of the box and have quite a bit of WEB thought behind them.

For example:

http://www.plone.org

and for something completely different:

http://www.mojoportal.com

Its a pity that i don’t see textpattern in this list :
http://textpattern.com/

You might also look at Sitefinity from Telerik. I good CMS that has an asp.net base which if you are part of that system, which we are, allows you to work directly in Visual Studio and modify and write your own controls and modules. Best for experienced programers that don’t want to write systems themselves but implement and add to. Great support and very technically advanced. AND they have a free version that’s perfect for community sites but the main system is Enterprise oriented.

http://www.sitefinity.com

Avoid Joomla? Use Drupal? Have you ever even TRIED to make a template for them? I would say avoid Drupal like the plague and give Joomla a try, but definitely avoid Drupal.

Also, please do a follow up article after reading these comments. Lots of people list awesome CMS like Plone and Textpattern.

Linux? Why on would anyone *ever* subject themselves to more stability, better security, the absence of viruses and spyware, free software, open formats, better support and the opportunity, at their discretion, to learn? Heavens to Betsy!

An interesting article which I found very useful until I got to the end. Your statements relating to Joomla! give personal opinions which do not appear to be backed by any substantiative “evidence” or analysis. I had to consider whether the sole purpose of your article was actually to give Joomla! a bit of a bashing, rather than to provide potential readers with a balanced overview of Content Management Systems to allow them to make an informed decision on which ones to try.

Have you actually tried 1.5.x or are you basing your experience on 1.0.x (in which case I completely agree, it was clunky, irritating and not particularly user friendly).

As others have commented, sure it can be a challenge finding particular extensions to achieve your requirements – particularly when you are new to the CMS – but did you think to ask on the (extremely popular and well supported) forums, or to ask in other support facilities such as the IRC chat room? Did you search the Joomla Extensions Directory which is laid out in categories to aid identification of extensions to meet your needs?

Numerous times when I was getting started, a simple post or message on the forums/chat room detailing what I wanted to accomplish was greeted with support from a whole range of people, from developers to other designers and users of Joomla!. 9 times out of 10 I’d find what I wanted, the other 1 time I would have to do a bit more digging myself or refine what I was actually asking.

As to the comments about paying for extensions, do you expect to get everything for free? One particular component I know for a fact cost in excess of £2500 to create, do you expect the people who came up with it to give it away for free? Personally, paying £20 (for example) for a license is simply factored into the cost of creating the website and a fee which I willingly pay.

Personally I came to Joomla! having tried other CMS’, and initially it was something of a steep learning curve, however I have not yet come across any site I couldn’t build using Joomla! – from downloadable videos purchased through a shop to interactive galleries, community portals and so forth. I couldn’t have accomplished this without the support of the community which you dismiss as “huge in the worst possible way”.

It does disappoint me that such a useful and interesting article ends in such a negative sense, particualarly as people may be genuinely wishing to find out more about Content Management Systems and because of your review, would not consider an extremely powerful and flexible system which might well meet their needs.

It is a shame that you did not bother to take the time to actually critically appraise the pro’s and con’s and instead decided to launch your own personal attack on the system without any actual basis for said complaints.

As a side note, there are several community events going on at the moment which seek to involve newcomers, developers, the core team and other interested parties (www.joomladay.org.uk for the next UK JoomlaDay – they’re happening across the world) – not many other CMS’ offer this kind of community involvement and encouragement in my experience, and this is something to be praised (in my opinion).

Anyway, I’ll get off my soap box now, I don’t usually comment but this article made me feel compelled to do so!

Ruth

MODX, modx, MODX!

I tried:
- Joomla, its ugly and not userfriendly and there ist too much bad code
- Wordpress – not really a CMS
- Expression Engine, not bad, too expensive
- Typo3, powerful but ugly backend, good for huge projects

And the best and most flexible of all is MODx. And the preview (SVN) of the next Version ‘Revolution’ is stunning. Dont be afraid of the not so nuce looking modxcms.com. Just dowload and try it!

Amateurs… serious web professionals use Alfresco!

Great to see you are so balanced in your opinions.

“Never, ever, ever allow an IT guy to choose your Content Management System. It is a rare breed that understands both code and a friendly user interface.”

“Take for example the huge amount of people who insist on running Linux. I still have no idea why people wish to inflict that kind of pain on themselves.”

There, there. Just because you don’t understand it, honey, doesn’t mean others can’t. Don’t feel bad though. You can always fall back on your outstanding social skills, and stylish, yet blandly styled computer gear

I don’t know who you are. To be honest, I know I’m really wasting my time even commenting. I just can’t believe that you actually think you’re expert enough to give advice to others, while holding such idiotic views like:

“it is imperative that whoever the Mac guy is among you, sign off on anything that the IT guy presents”

I totally agree though, that if you are going ask an IT gal do work for you, you should come up with hard requirements. Don’t waste her valuable time. That said, I’d be surprised if you could formulate enough coherent thought between posting to twitter on your new iPhone, though. Worth a shot though.

Great post though, except for the content. Too bad a CMS can’t help you with that.

Hey people, basically don’t rely on this article alone to judge which is the best CMS. This article is..yeah pretty biased. Joomla is a great CMS. What he said here about Joomla seems like it was done deliberately to create an interesting debate..to cause a little controversy etc etc.

WordPress = Yes.

Drupal = Oh god no.

Joomla = Truly evil.

You should check out Smallbox CMS. It’s a proprietary SaaS solution but it also integrates the back end with the front end similar to Concrete5. It’s a great product that powers a great many sustainable-oriented sites such as GreenPlaybook.org and CaGDC.

An interesting article overall, but a few comments couldn’t be resisted.

First of all so many people seem to agonize over the use of Wordpress vs Joomla or something else. They need to realize that the two have totally different applications. Wordpress is a blogging platform and a damn good one too, but it is not appropriate for writing an entire web site. This is where Joomla and the other CMSs come into their own and that is their purpose.

It would seem that you have either had a bad experience with Joomla from your comments or you haven’t given it a fair go. It is an excellent CMS and as you say there are a myriad of extensions to deal with particular issues. Yes, some of these are commercial, but many are free. You can always get recommendations as to the best ones by posting for people’s opinions on the Forum.

Whilst there may well be many extensions to “cure” particular requirements, what’s so different about that compared with normal software? How many photo editors are out there for example?

I write all my sites in Joomla now, particularly since the advent of 1.5. Yes, I am a developer, but I have had no problems with clients wanting to edit their own content. They have picked it up quickly.

As a cautionary note, I would also add that running with a CMS “in early development” can be fraught with danger. There is no assurance it will get of the ground and no assurances that they will deliver on their promises. I think “vaporware” is an appropriate term here.

Cheers,

Ric (@RicRaftis on Twitter)

I really enjoyed your article and your list of CMS was very helpfull. I was actually looking for something like Concrete5 for a client.

Thanks Alot!

OK I have read you reviews and to be honest find them total rubbish. Before you start thinking im a newbie, my latest website (Made in Joomla by the way) was featured in Vogue, so yes im pretty good at it. You can see links to it form my website link in my portfolio.

Any CMS should be able to build a business website, not a blog or some other rubbish site, if your a webdesigner, it needs to do what ever you ask of it, not some parts and then cobble other bits on.

The biggest hurdle a CMS has is integrating the member systems, so when you sign up once to one part, you are actually signed up through the entire site to all other parts. Yes we could make a great site with

Word press for the articles/page, PHPBB 3 for the forum, then Magento for a shopping system, never mind a support ticket system etc.

But you will have to sign up for each part individually and you will never be able to tie them all up. So as an admin you won’t know if username paul222 is the same person in the shop as paul222 is in the forum as they are not related.

For example (ive never used Frog or concrete 5 so i have ignored them for the moment)

Word press – it has
- no community system
- no ecommerce system
- no forums
- no paid membership system

So basically unless you want a blog, it is useless.

Drupal is amazing as a community system, but has an extremely poor ecommerce, so that rules that out as 99% of most modern website want to use some form of ecommerce however small. You say Drupal allows direct editing on the page, well so does Joomla, but you obviously didn’t check that bit in this in-depth study of yours.

Magento
Well this is basically an amazing ecommerce, but it is just an ecommerce system and nothing else. So if you want to add articles, a blog, a forum, a chat room, in fact anything at all but a blog, then it won’t work.

Your right about Silver Stripe, it has full potential, but only if it moves fast enough to keep up with Drupal and Joomla.

Radiant
Well once again it has very little extras such as ecommerce (well actually no ecommerce at all), forums, or extras., so no good to any business.

Joomla, well here we go -
It has For FREE, like none of the others you tried
- Ecommerce (VirtueMart)
- Forum (Fire Board)
- Blog (built in)
- Article system (built in)
- Contact forms (built in)
- Advanced search systems (built in)
- Synchronised members across everything in the site (Built in)
- Stats system (Built in)
- Ability to turn off bits in the admin you don’t need (which the reviewer here obviously hasn’t found yet Built in)

I have never not found the ability to find something that I need for a site. Tell you what you find me another CMS with all them functions, as I haven’t found one yet.

never let an IT guy pick a CMS? strange comment. I thought the IT guys built them. Maybe they all had graphic designers do all the presentation. again, strange, and yes, offensive. I had you marked on delicious. I’ll probably remove that. But hey, I’m just one of those “IT guys” so you may safely disregard this. keyboard warrior rant off.

Great post, thanks again

Great article, and it closely matches my own impressions. I personally would have rated Wordpress as the #1 existing CMS over Drupal just for sheer ease of use, but Drupal definitely has the edge in extensibility. Part of me is sad to see the omission of Movable Type because it was the only game in town for so long, but it has definitely been left in the dust by Wordpress as far as plugins, themes and styles, and community support go.

And your comment that “Joomla is evil”? Congratulations for not resorting to profanity. I can’t mention #$%^&* Joomla without swearing. It really is horrible.

I’m surprised no one mentioned ModX in these sorts of lists. It’s by far the easiest to use, a fantastic user interface and completely customizable. In fact it’s geared just as much toward the designer as it is to the developer (PHP). Its in late beta but pretty solid, it only lacks a real good support system which for some may be a deal breaker. But the more who use the better that will become.

I do not work for them but I use it on just about all of my projects.

http://www.modxcms.com

I’ve been using SilverStripe a while and have not looked back.

Wordpress… it’s great for blogs, but it isn’t so wonderful as a CMS. The way the content is posted is very much in an article/tag/date structure. It simply isn’t as easy to use when creating a sitetree or structure.

It’s also horrible to theme, but that goes for Drupal too =D

I found this article to be pretty far off base. I’ve used a number of content management systems and have yet to find a better one than ExpressionEngine. Maybe I found the article off base because I love EE; maybe it was because it was in face way off?

Re: Not letting an IT guy choose your CMS. I just love how the heading reads “IT Guy” but in what follows the heading, it becomes a Windows vs. Mac thing. How’s that? If you’re an “IT” guy, you’re automatically using Windows and if you’re using Windows you’re capable if choosing a CMS? I’m an “IT Guy” and am pretty sure I’m capable of choosing a CMS wisely.

Re: Going with the little guy. You’re basically suggesting the “little guy” in picking some promising CMS’s to list. It’s true, they are promising but they are the little guy.

Other thoughts: I just feel like a little more thought and research could have been put into this article. There’s a lot more CMS’s out there like TextPattern and ExpressionEngine that should be listed in any CMS article, but they aren’t. I know, I know, ExpressionEngine isn’t FREE right? Well, technically they do have a free version but I would gladly pay twice the amount for EE than the other 15 CMS’s I’ve used that are garbage.

Couple of questions.

“The only way to get the functionality you would ever really need beyond basic content management is to pay large sums of money for commercial modules.”

How much are you paying, and is it any cheaper on other systems to do the equivalent work?

“The community is huge in the worst possible way.”

What are those ways and how do your favourite three communities compare?

“There are a million modules for one problem and it is near impossible to find the right one.”

The official extension directory lists less than 5,000 of all extensions types (modules are just one). How does this compare to the range of free or commercial addons for your favourite three.

“The interface is deplorable. None of the methods of content management make any sense, and it is obviously not meant to be user friendly considering the top dollar training offered for the system.”

Who is offering the training and how does it compare to the other software reviewed in the article? You can pay a little or a lot for iWeb training (not really comparable to Joomla).

Points 5 and 4: agree wholeheartedly

Point 3: In defense, the little guy might disappear overnight (but then so can the big guys – fall through to point 4 – do your homework). Size is a function of what you need out of the CMS.

Point 2: Generally reasonable although I would say “bigger is, well, just bigger”. Apple is also a “big fish” (and yes, I use a Mac). iWeb is not a little guy.

Point 1: Agree. Pick what suits you.

Not sure if that tar Joomla with an “evil” brush.

I think Chris Szabo nailed it in the “Top 5 Drawbacks of Joomla!”

He, too, spoke to the over-abundance of extensions available. Worth a read.

http://community.joomla.org/magazine/article/545-top-5-drawbacks-of-joomla.html

I forgot, Chris even addressed your point about the Mac guy. Brilliant!

I’m sorry, but choosing the right CMS is never this cut and dry. You have to approach each project differently and expect that the client will eventually want to do something other than what their current CMS is capable of doing. Ease-of-use, setup time, and community play a large part as well.

Saying that one CMS is better for all applications is really kind of draconian. Constraint is the mother of design.

Magento is also *not* a CMS, per se, but is a full-featured ecommerce package with CMS capabilities.

Just my 2px…

I really liked your article. I have the same feeling towards Joomla. Although it is a mature CMS it is developed in a way that makes it hard to deploy and use. I like that Joomla can be extended but finding a right extension can be a nightmare – and it always takes to much time to check if the extension fits your needs.

I like content management systems that:

1. are easy to deploy,
2. clearly separate each phase of web page development (so if you an editor you don’t need to see the part of cms responsible for template design, etc.)
3. are easy and intuitive to use – i don’t have time to explain how cms works to all editors that use it – with over 50 web sites deployed it is impossible to do.

The CMS I really liked is +CMS (webcast demo: http://www.pluscms.net/cms/content/php/englishFlashStart.php)

I guess finding the prefect cms is very hard as there are thousands of systems out there. At least we can pick out the ones that help us to do our work. Joomla certainly failed to do so in my job.

I’m completely in love with Wordpress. Yes, I know it is a blog software, but I’ve used it for all my small-business clients who need simple content management. It’s so easy for non-tech people to understand, especially when they want something they can start working with immediately.

I too have been frustrated in an attempt to use Joomla, but I’ve assumed that that was because it didn’t fit my needs, which goes back to mistake #4. You really have to do your research in how the CMS will be used, what features are required, who will be maintaining content, what kind of tech support is required, etc. etc. There are so many options out there. An “evil” CMS or “just” a blog software might work great for one client, while being horrid for another.

I don’t believe someone can say that wordpress or drupal is more user friendly than Joomla!

Very nice article
Best Tip: Avoid Joomla
I totally agree, it´s work from satan

I’ve just installed and started using Silver Stripe on recommendations from above and so far it seems really great. Interface is easy to get around and my clients will be able to use it easily I hope!
I tried out Joomla and the admin interface is just not intuitive enough if you need to hand it over to clients to run.

Always interesting to follow these kinds of versus debates. As I started with WordPerfect 20 years ago, nothing beat that! … and similar with CMSs – whatever you started with or currently use, will for some time be your preference.

But then again, many new and interesting suggestions – surely will try them out. Always a good idea to broaden the horisont

Hmmm… This article is a touch biased, to say the least. With a title like ‘How to choose the right CMS’ you would have expected a well thought out, researched article about the factors that should affect your choice. Instead we get a rant about the author’s personal preferences in the field of web publishing systems (Let’s be honest, there are systems there that are not a CMS, i.e Wordpress & Magento) and operating systems.

Every CMS has pros and cons, Joomla has many more of both than most other CMSs. Users who are ‘web savvy’ to a basic level can be taught to use a well put together Joomla site in less than a day. And for developing it, why would you work with someone who does not know it? Would you work with a mac developer to create a piece of software for Windows, or OS2?

I’ve had a client recently who had had a very poor experience with Drupal, their site was put together by someone who didn’t know Drupal properly, and therefore the final product was poor.

Mistake #5 is farcical. What is the point in having a tech guy how would understand the limitations of any available system if you’re not going to listen to his recommendations? What has using a mac got to do with know what a good UI is? There are plenty of mac users who, apart from using a mac (agreed, it’s the best OS UI around at the moment) wouldn’t know a good UI design if it jumped up and slapped them round the face!

Please, please, please, WDD, can we have some more objective articles with useful information, or at least proper titles. This should have been called, “One Man’s view on CMS selection”. It would still have been an interesting read, but we wouldn’t have read it with the expectation of a quality and informative article.

I wouldn’t say wordpress is the be all and end all, but its a pretty good place to start and can be flexible over a wide variety of uses.

Nothing is lost…….. except for time wasted on Joomla!.

Magento is also a promising piece of software, takes a little bit to get used to. can be tricky to install on the server, but very good and hopefully will only get better.

Stilverstripe on the right server ROCKS. I use it for all of our clients now, and everyone seems to love it.

Joomla – pure evil??? I completely disagree and personally I love building sites with Joomla. Aside from being an excellent CMS, it is incredibly flexible and highly scaleable.

Additionally, Joomla is extremely easy to create templates for, very accessible, and not difficult to learn how to use. It takes me 1-2 hrs max to train a client to use the Joomla admin.

Sure, at first any new system, especially a CMS, is going to be unfamiliar and take a certain amount of time to get to grips with, but once you understand the core funcionality — designing bespoke websites using Joomla actually becomes an enjoyable and rewarding experience.

I respect Web Designer Depot, but calling Joomla “pure evil” is just plain ridiculous and frankly misleading, especially as it is open source and has such a great development community behind.

The content of some of the more positive comments regarding Joomla on this page reinforces my views.

@Ian Wright: I completely agree with your comments, and especially about Magento — how can this be classed as CMS when it is primarily an e-commerce platform, which doesn’t even have a built-in WYSIWYG editor for the CMS functionality!

I must agree with Georg, your list of promising CMS looks promising

But the list of top 5 CMS consist of incomparable products (at least if you compare the functionality it brings). Still I’m missing CMS I use – Kentico CMS, which solves the IT Geeks (Moss and Roy) vs. Ordinary people (Jen) thing, since it provides two development models – one for guys who never ever wrote a hello world and the other for senior developers (both combined as you whish). Also the functionality covers not only CMS, but E-commerce and Social Networking stuff as well.

While Joomla has it’s weaknesses every other CMS does too. The fact is that Drupal (top of your list) and Joomla(bottom of your list) are among the most popular open source content management systems.

Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of Joomla and Drupal is the only way people will select the right CMS for their needs. We at webologysolutions.com want to further this debate. We are conducting a survey of experienced Drupal and Joomla users.

Our goal is to quantify the tradeoffs involved in selecting a CMS. The survey will also let us incorporate the opinions of Joomla and Drupal users. We think this will make our analysis more concrete and convincing. If you are experienced with either Joomla or Drupal, please take our survey at: http://www.webologysolutions.com/ebusiness-blog/joomla-vs-drupal-survey.html

If you would like to know more about the purpose of the survey please read our blog post at: http://www.webologysolutions.com/ebusiness-blog/Take-our-Survey.-Determine-CMS-Selection-Best-Practices.html

We use and love LightCMS (http://www.speaklight.com) it’s very easy to use and install.

I have to agree with many of the posts above. While it’s great to see some new and up coming CMS’s, I am afraid that your criteria for ranking and citing some of these examples seems flawed.

I find it hard to really list wordpress and joomla in the same realm. While I think wordpress, it’s still a blog and pales in comparison to the flexibility and diversity that Joomla has. The same is true with Magento, it’s hard to list that in the same category as wordpress.

I really think this article should be re-written to better reflect each of these cms’s capabilities and compare them to one another.

From a practical perspective as a communications person trying to achieve a simple goal of a web site, I have to say that Joomla has some serious issues. We use Joomla and I cannot believe how user-unfriendly it is for the non-technical degreed person. First, why is it so difficult to search the content in Joomla? This is completely mystifying. My predecessors produced lots of content and it is very difficult to find it on Joomla. There is no search function, no simple interface to show the organization of the information, etc. When I’ve identified an “Item ID” number simply by going through our web site, it is then a big game to figure out where the hell it is within the CMS itself. The Joomla help file is useless, written to explain how to install Joomla, but not enough on using it. It was obviously not designed for the layperson to use. I bought a Joomla help book online and that is equally useless. Very simple actions are shrouded in mystery. We often revise the site with hit-or-miss trial-by-error actions. It’s completely frustrating. The only reason we don’t switch is because of some directive from a long-departed tech person that has somehow been etched into stone….

Another vote for Textpattern! Admin isn’t “beautiful” out of the box – but easily modified and branded. Super usable and intuitive CMS.

I have to agree with Deron (#79)

I know, I know, ExpressionEngine isn’t FREE right? Well, technically they do have a free version but I would gladly pay twice the amount for EE than the other 15 CMS’s I’ve used that are garbage.

I’ve used Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress, Dragonfly and non of them can compare to EE in terms of ease of use and flexibility.

Great list there, I haven’t heard of some of them.

I agree about Joomla, it’s too heavy and I haven’t used it in forever.

In my opinion there is no greater cms then ocportal and I dear you to prove me wrong.

Really useful article.

I prefer Wordpress. It’s really flexible and I use it for setting up everything from blogs to small business websites. I like it a lot, plus the community of free and helpful plug-ins is what really makes it a winner for me.

It was so interesting to see how many people dislike Joomla. I’ve tried to get into it several times and just couldn’t. It’s cluttered, confusing, and just downright messy. Bleh.

I was really excited about Magento when it was in beta last year. I tested the early builds and it looked promising, but wasn’t ready for primetime. I’m curious to see how much it’s improved now that it’s a stable build.

A lot of interesting CMS pieces on here that I haven’t heard of. I’ll have to check them out.

Great article, once again. Very informative.

Hi,

I am the author of this article. First allow me to congratulate anyone who has made it through the whole article and all of the comments to reach this point.

Now I would like to address as many of the comments that were made as possible.

1. My apologies to ANYONE I have offended in my remarks on Joomla! and Linux/Windows.

2. My reasons for bashing on Joomla! are because of my own personal experiences. I have worked with many CMS systems over several years, and the ones I listed are those that have appealed to me as a designer who has been forced to learn programming. During that time I have developed the “superhuman-ability” to use Joomla! well enough to build a site, but would never, ever, EVER suggest a non-programmer to attempt to use it… ever.

3. The reason for not listing a number of other CMS, such as TYPO3, Movable Type, etc… is because of my personal opinion and experience with the systems, and I would suggest to anyone reading this that they follow the advice in the beginning of my article, and do some research on these CMS as well.

4. To all those listing Expression Engine, my apologies. This article was meant to be focused on Open Source CMS.

5. For those upset about me listing Magento, my purpose was just to bring it to light for those who might be looking for it. Although it focuses on e-commerce, a CMS is a CMS, and for those few who have been looking for it, it was worth the mention.

6. My reason for listing Wordpress as a CMS is the amazing strides it has made in becoming a fully fledged system. To address specifically comment #73, Wordpress has grown to include:

- Ecommerce (WP e-commerce)
- Contact forms (several plugins)
- Blog (what it was built for)
- Article system (also what it was built for)
- Advanced search systems (built in)
- Synchronised members (Member-Wing plug)
- Stats system (Built in)
- Ability to turn off bits in the admin you don’t need (Built in)
- Full fledged Social networking (Buddypress)
- And more…

What’s more important is that all of these plugins are easily installed and managed. You get a great looking website and one of the easiest admin interface available on the internet.

I am right now seriously suggesting Wordpress to any beginning or experienced developer as a full fledged CMS.

7. For those of you supporting Joomla!, again I am sorry if I upset you with my opinions. It must be pointed out though that most of you who commented in favor of Joomla! have programming experience or knowledge extraordinary to designers whom I was speaking to.

8. To everyone else who left comments, thanks for your thoughts and including those CMS you enjoy and use. I’m sure they will be helpful to people who read the article. Good luck to all of you designers in picking the right CMS for you.

“it is imperative that whoever the Mac guy is among you, sign off on anything that the IT guy presents.”

Come on! Anyone who calls themselves a “mac guy” or a “PC guy” or whatever is the worst sort of geek – the consumer geek.

Get a real user to look at it. Not some computer fanboy

But LightCMS is not free. Since it being a hosted service I think I will not have much control over everything. But yes I agree its purly for someone who has limited team support.

TextPatern

Well I am no designer or programmer but I found Joomla dead simple. I had a site up in no time flat and now spend my spare time coaching others in setting up and enhancing sites. I have been able to modify things as required and have been able to find extensions and plug-ins that suit my needs. I have even made my own templates!

Sure, it sometimes takes some study, but that’s part of learning any new system. It suits my purposes and gives me flexibility into the future.

I think its also unfair to blame Joomla (as some have) for problems with extensions. Anyone who tries out a new plug-in on a live site is a fool.

Go Joomla!

1. hosted CMS not good for everyone
2. yes this article makes a debate (with lots angry comments) but No, it not helpful and it author seems beginner just learning
3. sorry, just my opinion, but not too good article
4. every CMS require some learning, each has different API and GUI operations
5. maybe better if pure designers use hosted CMS offerings and leave the other CMS to ones with programming experience PHP or RubyRails
6. best solution = designers design site and programmer implement the design (and IT people at company stay out of way, they just use Exchange and not usually experienced with internet, just their own internal system and they fear changes)

Jason –

I love Drupal and WordPress, too. I completely agree that WordPress is suitable for low-end CMS needs. I’ve been playing with BuddyPress which is a ridiculously easy to deploy social networking tool. Drupal undeniably rocks, is incredibly flexible, and has the geekiest, enthusiastic community one could hope for.

I wonder if you have worked with Joomla! 1.5, or if your experience was limited to the older version? I recommend trying the Joomla! “Quick Start” guide http://docs.joomla.org/Beginners.

Using this material, it takes less than four hours to create a Web site for a fictitious landscaping company. The training material was put together by two high school students as part of the Google Highly Open Participation contest.

I am almost certain you will find Joomla! 1.5 very easy to work with for non geeks.

Joomla! 1.5 has been refactored from it’s Mambo beginnings and now has a very modern, powerful application architecture that is fun to work with for developers, but most users never see the creamy inside of Joomla!’s chocolate cookie. Just us geeks.

No news is bad news, right? Thanks for spotlighting free software. It’s so cool to see what results when lots of people pour their hearts and talent into bringing good stuff to the world.

Amy

“7. For those of you supporting Joomla!, again I am sorry if I upset you with my opinions. It must be pointed out though that most of you who commented in favor of Joomla! have programming experience or knowledge extraordinary to designers whom I was speaking to.”

Sorry, but I have NO programming experience and am using daily Joomla! with great pleasure and ease since a few years.

You are free to express your own feelings, but writing “Joomla is evil” is grotesque and encouraging hate. I thought we had enough of it on this planet.

I use both Wordpress and Joomla!, have just installed Drupal to test it. You can have a Cadillac, a Fiat AND a BMW, no ?

Good attempt at a comparison article, but this is a tough topic to cover.

I’ve built sites in Drupal, Magento and Joomla. I am a creative who happens to be doing all of our development out of the sheer need to make our sites look and work the way they need to. I have the ideas, the looks and know what functionality needs to go into making sites that work as needed for the end user.

I’m doing sites with pretty complex functionality that require a significant amount of very technical development. Most of the time a pre-built module, component or extension just won’t cut it.

Of all the sites I built in Drupal I had to spend hours and hours searching for answers only to find complex and limited solutions.

Joomla! on the other hand is quite the opposite. Most of the Joomla! core team is extremely active in the community and are some of the most helpful and knowledgable people on the planet. If I post questions at any time of the day or night I usually get a reply within minutes or hours. It may come from Sam or Andrew down under, Johan or Wilco across the pond or Anthony, Amy, Louis, Rob or Joe right in my backyard.

So the main point of my comment is this—You get what you put into Open Source. Joomla! is such a great framework because of the people behind it and all of it’s contributing community members.

If you are building websites for a living or even on the side and are expecting an Open Source CMS to do it all for you you’re up for a painful wake up call. You have to invest in learning how a system (and the web in general) works. If you’re not up for that investment then I suggest you stick to building blog sites with Wordpress.

In regards to letting a Designer have the final sign off on a CMS that is an egotistical comment that can only be made by a designer. There needs to be equal input from both sides—creative and technical. Being a creative I’ve seen and been a part (large part) of projects that were directed solely by the creative side. I could go into a long rant here about designers not having technical knowledge and developers throwing design out the window but I’ll save that for another time.

Nice, I’m going to check these out. It’s going to be sooo nice when websites will be easier for designers to build. Remember Photoshop 3 & 4 how hard it was to do simple tasks like a drop shadow?….Look at it now. The programmers will fight this maybe, but there will be a push forward internally within the software companies to make software that writes correct code and you won’t have to worry about, just design it—it WILL happen. Think how much programming that’s gone / going on in the background when you use Photoshop—this web stuff is waay to complex and I know I’m not alone on this. People would much rather design the page & get it up than have to worry about “why on a Windows Xp running IE 6 is my logo not lining up with the edge of my header”…lame.

Just to add in comment to Jason, I had absolutely no programming experience whatsoever … none, nada, nowt. Nowdays I certainly wouldn’t class myself as a programmer although I have picked up the **basics** of html, css, and a bit of php along the way. Definitely not enough to code my own work yet though!

I certainly don’t have any extraordinary skills …. unless you count the ability to use google, forums, chat, and contacts that I have gained via twitter and other mediums, to find answers to any questions that spring up.

Nice of you to assume that I had some kind of superhuman skills, but a questioning mind and knowing where to get answers was all it took (and a bit of patience here and there if the answer wasn’t staring me in the face!)

Ruth

payed=>ExpressionEngine… top of the notch support
Free=>CMS Made Simple… might not be excelent for “editors” mut the {smarty} tag system beats anything for costumization… you can do advanced PHP programing creating php blocks and (re)using it’s {smarty} tag whenever you want!

They both are similar on this concept… EEngine lacks some more Wysiwyg support… coldn’t get tinymce to work due to UTF-8 / latin/iso conflicts…

Another vote for EE. If you don’t put it as number 1 or 2 you’re CRAZY!!! The rest of the stuff out there is junk! Trust me, I’ve tried them all. Best templating engine to date. Great

DotNetNuke sucks terribly. I’m surprised that this is not on your list of CMS software not to use. In my previous job, I was stuck in DNN hell, and thank God I am free!

Wordpress is by far the best CMS in my opinion, and is the most free and open you will find, in addition to the thousands of freely available themes, plugins, etc. Why anybody would prefer it over anything else is beyond my comprehension.

I recommend it to any and all clients who want a professional website which is easy to maintain.

Wordpress is looked at as a blogging platform, but it can be used very effectively as a CMS. It is also very SEO friendly. DotNetNuke is the exact opposite. The URLS it generates are simply absurd.

I’m sad that you have obviously had a negative experience with Joomla. I too hated Joomla when I first saw it but once you understand it, everything makes perfect sense. The supplied documentation isn’t bad but yes there are training courses available to help you get up to speed more quickly. They are not all “top dollar training” as you put it. I provide an online video course for only $10 and my customers simply love using Joomla.

I like this, Joomla is evil, i use to go and try it but when the layout was still in béta, i was hacked by some sovjet gang, beside for the common business-site its way to big, i guess this must be the favorite of many IT guys, because no-one beside them can work on that thing properly.

I recommend Wordpress, it’s so easy for everyone, who can send a mail can update his/hers site running on Wordpress.

Maybe i’ll try some of the others, great post!

I have a question to all happy Joomla lovers. Maybe you can help me out. What do you do when the structure of your content needs more levels than just ’sections’ and ‘categories’????
How do you explain to a client that you can create menu levels as deep as you want, but your content can only have 2 levels.
I think the major flaw of Joomla is the separation between document structure (sections and categories) and the menu structure. Trying to make those two structures work well together has driven me mad. It just doesn’t make sense.
I must be missing something, but a CMS that only allows 2 levels of content structure is not worthy of being called a CMS.

I think Wordpress is great if you went to start up and go, but the documentation is just a mess. If you want to develop things custom instead of using prefab themes and plugins it’s not easy.

I’ve had much better luck just searching Google for what I need than trying to find it in their documentation. I’m glad people who use Wordpress like to blog about it; otherwise I’d be lost.

@Jason

Like Amy, I’m wondering what version you had experiences with. At any rate, feel free to mail me with your grievances. Part of the process of developing good software is working out why people are “connecting” with it. We can’t always help everyone and ultimately the choice of CMS sometimes comes down to “I just don’t like the stupid thing”, but hey, if we can learn something and improve it can benefit millions of people around the world.

Andrew Eddie
Joomla Development Coordinator

Experience is everything. If you are only exposed to a handful of free or nearly free tools and have no direct experience designing and developing for higher end CMS systems then how can you make any objective observations?

Our team at E-Cubed has designed and developed several hundred sites in the last decade, 90% of which use some form of CMS system. Most of our project budgets over the last 3 years are in the $40,000 – $75,000 arena.

Each level of offering has its pros and cons. I’ve have yet to see a client who has a serious project budget (>$25,000) and who is fully knowledgeable in the variety of available CMS solutions in the marketplace choose an OpenSource offering.

I have never had a client move from a traditional commercial CMS platform such as Ektron, Sitecore, etc. to a SaaS or Open Source ‘competitor’.

Each level of CMS appeals to a certain level of buyer for a certain purpose. If you have a single user with a 20 page site then your needs are significantly different than if you have 20 users, 5,000+ pages and do $10,000,000 in online sales and support.

The articles named solutions may be the ‘Right’ fit for sites with limited users, non-critical content, small budgets and users with lower expectations.

Users that need a bullet proof, scalable, mission-critical system that can seamlessly link with a myriad of other critical systems may not find these such a right fit.

Just my $.02

What a worthless post!

You titled your article “How to choose the right CMS” and yet you say…

“Take for example the huge amount of people who insist on running Linux. I still have no idea why people wish to inflict that kind of pain on themselves”

Uummm, maybe it’s because Linux is right for what they want to do, they choose it because it’s right for them. You clearly have no idea about Linux or are just brainwashed by the WinMac crowd. And no I don’t use Linux because it’s not right for the jobs I want to do.

You say “Joomla is Evil”

Umm…. maybe some people find it work just about right for the things they want or need to achieve

I could go on….

By all means an article on choosing the right CMS is great, but going on to show your biases helps no-one

Very disappointed to see such a load of rubbish on a blog that normally a very good read!

wow. CMS really is a hot topic for web people.

Drupal and wordpress is simply the way to go. lots of resources and online support. i have to give props too to modx, its also simple to use, and fairly extendable.

cheers! great post.

Frog CMS.. ouch.. just take a look to the demo site ( http://www.opensourcecms.com/cms/frog/ ).. full of erromessages like:

in the main page (!) :
Fatal error: Call to a member function children() on a non-object in /home/opencms/public_html/demo/frog/frog/app/frontend/classes/Page.php(192) : eval()’d code on line 2

and many more in the admin like:
Warning: Division by zero in /home/opencms/public_html/demo/frog/frog/plugins/comment/views/index.php on line 35

I’ve chekecked the code, and only I can say beware of Frog CMS!!

If someone say frog cms is great than I1m not suprised he said Joomla! is evil..

In 3hrs, we just built a website from Joomla for an artist,
http://www.orlakeane.com/
(She is adding in content in her own time, but we got the main site structure in place)

It has everything Orla needed and she is not a computer programmer at all. In fact she struggles very much with word, never mind HTML, CSS or heavens forbid PHP.

I set up a simple skeleton structure for her, all she needs to do is add a page, and choose which category it will be included in and it will add it to the list of other pages.

She is thrilled with it and it also has the potential in the future to increase features as her demand for what it needs to do increases..

She cant believe it is sooooo easy…so maybe you people who are pro-web designers commenting here, should really try it and see what potential it has…as i think you will be suprised at how simple it is.

> Joomla is evil.

In my experience those attacking Joomla are those people that didn’t spend enough time getting used to it – people angry with it because they don’t know how to use it to do a specific thing.

The learning curve is not one of the easiest around, but you can’t really compare e.g. WordPress vs Joomla! WordPress is simple to use because it’s TOO simple.

> The only way to get the functionality you would ever really need beyond basic content management is to pay large sums of money for commercial modules.

Do you really think that? You can spend weeks reviewing open source extensions.

> The community is huge in the worst possible way.

ROTFL

> There are a million modules for one problem and it is near impossible to find the right one.

Just take the time it takes to find the tool that suits your needs. 99% it already exists, just find it.

> The interface is deplorable. None of the methods of content management make any sense, and it is obviously not meant to be user friendly considering the top dollar training offered for the system.

By who?

> That’s the end of the list.

Fortunately.

CMS Made Simple

@cccmien – Agreed! That is valid analysis. Nested categories are one of several major improvements, along with ACL, core comments, slated for Joomla! 1.6.

This isn’t my field, but I’m curious where CommonSpot fits in. The place where I work has been fiddling with CommonSpot for two+ years and it’s still not ready for prime time.

Muy buena información, nunca he utilizado joomla… pero un amigo me comenta que es una buena herramienta, yo no me opinaré, cada uno sabe lo que necesita.

Bye, very good

Overall an enlightening post. Some CMS that I havent used yet but will now try. I frequently develop in wordpress, Joomla, and in frameworks such as cakePHP and Codeigniter. I ‘ve also worked as a web designer and occasionally do illustration so I understand the admin interface can seem overwhelminly complex / busy.

The power of Joomla really comes in when you client wants more than just a simple website or blog. There are soo many components, modules and plugins – which are normally free that you can use as a base or as-is. This saves weeks even months off our production time and therefore our clients money. Within a few days I can normally have a shop or community sites barebones complete and ready for them to see.

Because its open source theres a strong development and design community around it there are always people who have solved your problems, or components you can adjust to fit your needs.

When we create a site we also take the time to train the user to use there site, with a guide to every aspect of its workings. Any CMS can be confusing – It depends on the experience of the end user.

All being siad Joomla is a great tool for particular jobs and is far from evil – but it does take some investment of time to make use of its full potential.

*********************

I sometimes think using an open source CMS is meant only for personal use because it’s free; otherwise, if you’re not an expert in that product, then you’re required to hire a company or individuals who can support you!

In my opinion, “open source” means you’re required as the admin to have at least some basic knowledge of the product so it can be installed by you, maintained by you, upgraded by you, patched by you, etc.

At the end of the day, sure, you want to be the person who does become the expert, but that kind of knowledge doesn’t come over night and sometimes you need that extra reassurance that you can count on someone to physically call if you need that support.
That’s one of the reasons why our office doesn’t use open source products, because we need that phone number.

My office doesn’t give me the time to read message boards or wait for a response from a message post or god forbid constantly require me to *bump* my question over and over so someone can help me for free. We use a product called SiteExecutive so we can quickly get the support needed immediately if support is required and at the same get cutting edge modules like blogging, dynamic/living content, RSS, advanced forms, password protected pages, searching, etc.

Anyhow, your article offered a lot of great tips for new users interested in a free CMS to try out! If I could give a suggestion it would be to write your next article on a content management systems focused on a list of paid products and include SiteExecutive in your review. They really have their act together.

http://www.siteexecutive.com/

- Evan

*********************

Nice post I love FrogCMS above all so far, it’s amazing to customize and light weight.

I’m a veteran, I once created my own CMS, but now settled using several different open source CMS, including Joomla. Each of them has their own strength (and weakness).

With that said, to be truly objective, I must agree with most, if not *all*, disappointments regarding Joomla complained here! Well said and very true indeed!

Joomla owes its broad users a functional CMS that get the jobs (managing contents) done.
At this time Joomla have only a very famous & big name, but doesn’t satisfy even basic CMS requirements.

These all might be proven to be invaluable inputs to Joomla’s developers.

My highest praise to the next famous CMS: Drupal (full CMS features, very flexible content types & organization, scalability) & Wordpress (simplicity, theme & plugin flexibility, easy to deploy, full blog features).

One of them, sooner or later, will be replacing Joomla on the top spot, ..should Joomla doesn’t improve.

First of all, thank you for this Post, it had some nice statements and some bad
But i have to disagree to almost everything written here (post and comments) but following:
Always remember to research a CMS before investing time in it. Never forget that the main purpose of a CMS is to make creating and editing content simple and easy. Never sacrifice the user experience for functionality. Remember these things and it will drastically improve your experience with Content Management Systems.

There is no perfect CMS, everyone has its likes and dislikes, as every CMS has its own advantages and disadvantages. When choosing the right CMS, first you have to think about what project you are at, what is needed and what not.
So Joomla is nice if you are making a medium to large site, but then again for what do i need such a big system if i only want to have a 5 page site?
Wordpress, is not really CMS, but yes you can use it as a CMS to, but is it suitable for a large Project? I dont think so.
Its the same with the Statement about Windows/Linux users, you should use what you need and what you are comfortable with.
I am Windows user and from time to time also Linux user and no im not a Geek, i started in Computer/Webdesign business by learning all myself, so i use what i have to use and if 95% of my Customers are using Windows, then i dont know why i should use any other OS just to be a Part of some so called “MAC Guy” Community.
With Windows my Customers feel comfortable with me and i can explane things in their language

So to come to the point, i have used or tryed many of CMS systems stated above and as already mentioned every systems has its own advantages and disadvantages, but if you want to feel comfortable with any of these you will have to spend some time with it and learn how to use it, no matter who you are a designer, programmer or just a simple user.

Everything we do in life we have to learn first and at the end we either like it or dislike it.

Kudos for the honest words regarding Joomla. I totally agree. To me the user interface is a farce. Joomla lacks style and design as well as usability.

I am kinda impressed about Drupal and even Typo3. It seemed as Wordpress would take them by storm. I never thought that Drupal would make a comeback – such an impressive comback.

he is right when he says, avoid joomla! the backend is so complex.

I used and continue to use Joomla and sometimes it is the only one that deals with all my requirements related to media and data layout customization.

Saying it is evil reminds me that some people used to say that photography was evil, because they didn’t understand it. This seems to be the case. You call something evil when you don’t quite understand how it works. Or maybe the author had a bad experience with it, but it doesn’t seem fair to disecourage people to use it… and certainly it is not evil!

It wouldn’t be one of the most used in the world if it were a bad piece of code. I’d put Joomla in one of the 3 best CMSs still today. I personaly like Wordpress better for small sites and Joomla for big and complicated ones. Well, maybe I’m evil too… who knows?

Thanks

Rui Alão

“Drupal is easily the most functional open source CMS available today.”

Ehm, i do work for many years with Umbraco, i am pretty sure that everything which is possible in Drupal, is also possible in Umbraco, and the good thing is that it is build in C# .

I have been working with SilverStripe, Drupal, and Wordpress and Joomla for two years.
SilverStripe is my pet CMS, and web development framework. Most of the time I try to use SilverStripe for my clients. In SilverStripe what I see it the maintainability is really high. When I do a project the client will never call me asking for this and that update. This makes me to stick with SilverStripe.

Not free but best suited CMS ever for me and my company has been expression engine.

It’s simple to use, it’s a designers CMS, and the modules , extensions and plug-ins are really of a great value! Lot’s of them free, some of them u need to pay… but they’re worth the money if u need some.

And a great personal support u get!

From the free CMS I agree with drupal

Okay, take a step back there to #141…

You remember when people said photography was evil? you must be OLD!

been going through this article and comments with great interest as I need to choose a CMS for the blog and forum on our soon to be launched online copyright protection app

The result ? seems like we will go for wordpress or EE…

Concrete5 is badass

What I think about expression engine is that it should replace Joomla here on this post. It is much more hard than Joomla . I am working on a really large project with Expression Engine. I dont find any good features there. My points are these,

- It is not MVC.
- Content Management is not good.
- Editors are not good at all (the lowest type, writing HTML in a TextArea).
- Coding new modules is really hard.

I am really fed up with it.

Personally I use ExpressionEngine and it is by far my favorite CMS that I have used. There is a learning curve that can be kinda steep when you are first starting out but the support community is great and have been able to answer every question that I have ever had. It is not open source but they do have a free version that has almost all of the functionality of the paid versions. Since I have switched to ExpressionEngine I have cut my development time down substantially and has been the best move for my business. With the new version coming out soon (but not soon enough) it will integrate with the PHP framework CodeIgnitor which will help with the creation of modules, extensions, and plugins quickly. I also love the ability to assign user levels and allow them restricted access to the control panel no longer do I have to worry about my client thinking he has to add his post to the template, because it wont even be an option for him. But the best thing for me is that it is built to have friendly urls, no more mysite.com/52/sit%597wi% crap.
As it is not possible for a single CMS to scratch the itch of every user while still being lightweight and user friendly we will continue to have debates like this one around the web. I put my vote in for EE.
PS. Nivanka. You can adjust the field type so that there is no HTML to be put in text areas. I set almost all of my clients up so that they need not put even a single html tag when they publish something new. What functionality are you trying to create that you need a module? Why not an extension or a plugin.

hi! you forgot exponent cms.. it’s very easy to use, essential, open source and free.. it’s backend less, all administrator things you can do only with frontend, editing content, uploading images..etc for me it’s user friendly and very nice approach to content managment.. try it!

I use frogcms , and i like very much it’s raw structure . It’s very simple and not a mess like other famouse ones .

Every aspect of FrogCMS is simple :
- MVC , really simple to put hands on
- Extendable , no HiperPhping to add a new feature
- Lightwight , in few MBs you’ve your dynamic content
- a NonMonster community , but the right number of people

in few words , a great CMS

Great tutorial. We can add to this list Xoops, LightCMS, Typo3, Modx and more. I used Joomla, Xoops, Drupal and Modx on my local server and my websites (of course on subdirectory) I preferred to Drupal. Because Drupal is powerful and free Cms. I used Joomla to and i agree with you; Joomla is Evil! when i install Joomla i’m dizzying

As a few people have mentioned, this post is complete conjecture, as are most of the comments. This falls into the category of spin material. I think most of the problems could be fixed if a better titled was chosen for this article (one that was more clear that these were opinions of largely one person), and if you managed to find a better balance between positives and negatives. You may think Joomla is evil, then give us examples rather than just making huge generalizations. You may love Frog, but give us more details about what is difficult about it. An unbalanced article like this has clearly caused many visitors to just feel attacked or proud. I can also say (being in the middle of the debate between Drupal and Joomla) that some members of the communities are already a little hostile to each other, which was obviously not considered when writing this article.

Overall this writing should have undergone some serious revisions before being posted. Perhaps it can still be salvaged, but I’d hate for new-comers to the CMS world to find this and only read this. I have nothing against the selections, just the lack of a balanced presentation. I don’t care if you recommend A or don’t recommend B, but give something a little more credible in your explanations.

I’m pretty disappointed in this post sneaking into a normally better written site. The editors are slacking or just aren’t concerned enough with the integrity of the articles.

Of course nobody will probably read this now that I’m #153, but its worth noting to the writer.

I agree with your article and some of the comments above.
Joomla is horrible, it’s difficult to install, difficult to maintain, the modules and language packs always crash the site… The customizing price is higher than building a new and professional system that realy works.
I think that one CMS that weights 200MB and has more tham 1000 files sucks.
I always build custom CMS for my costumers, with a few files and librarys. My CMS installs just copying the files through FTP, make 2 or 3 config settings and is ready to run, apply or change a Theme template, or invest in designing a custom one and that’s it. The system always fit to costumer expectations because it’s designed for their needs

I have used Joomla for years (since the Mambo days) and it has shown it’s age.
The initial code base is sloppy and even now it has no granular access control, a critical problem if you need that functionality.

Security is a BIG issue, and frankly, the code is not trustworthy.
On the plus side, a huge amount of extensions WITH an interface you can use to actually FIND them with. Granted, much is abandonware and poorly written, but the community is huge (in a good way).

regarding the guy who said
” Lastly, the inference in your comment ending “considering the top dollar training offered for the system” is that the core Joomla team have a commercial interest in offering training for Joomla. This is totally untrue and a perverse statement and phraseology used by you. The core Joomla team are staunchly open source and have consistently made moves to marginalise pure commercial interest and peripheral involvement of commercial third-party developers. If you have any doubt about this then I suggest you should research their recent moves relating to trade-mark and web sites with Joomla in their name: in brief, to continue using the Joomla name in a web site’s URL a site must demonstrate a completely non-commercial offering to the Joomla community. This last to be verified by the core Joomla team.”

Well, that guy is an idiot: Thats where Opensource really makes it’s money, since the code is open and anybody can copy it -AND sell it!. Obviously, you cant copy and sell a hands on training session (unless you get permission to record it)

specifically regarding this comment “and have consistently made moves to marginalise pure commercial interest and peripheral involvement of commercial third-party developers”
Well, that sounds not only like BULLSHIT but also contrary to what GPL is all about. Shrug.

In conclusion, I wouldnt recommend Joomla, but it’s certainly not the worst you can go with

//* Side Note*//
There was an earlier comment (#120) about having ‘deeper’ levels in website outlines, and Joomla ..well.. can ‘only have 2′.

Section
Category
Another Section
Another Category of Another Section
.. so on? So you want your users to get lost on your website? lmao.

This is one of the reasons why I like Joomla. The usability standards are good. It doesn’t let Joomla (end-user) designers get nasty with a really deep site outline.
//* End Side Note*//

I like Joomla because of the way it evolves and how the Joomla community makes it work while making it secure. The flexibility of having to edit the CSS is really, really nice.

BTW, I’m a Fine Arts Major, but I like Joomla (and proud of it!).

(This article is biased IMHO.)

CMS in a weekend they said…

Well thank you so much for this post! I read an article roughly 6 to 7 months ago that said Joomla was a CMS that can be done in a weekend. Well its Feb 5, 2009. And I still haven’t mastered Joomla. Hell, I have stopped working on my other sites because of the difficult nature of Joomla. I have spent money on books, templates and online tutorials (thanks Lynda.com) and still I’m not satisfied with the final product.

So, I will now be looking into Frog CMS and Drupal.

I’m sorry I didn’t see this post sooner. But glad that you were here for me to find.

WJWJR.

@Margarita Choco (#156)

About the ‘more-than-2-levels’ issue.

I’ll give a simple example of a real life problem I faced. I had a website for a travel agency, and they wanted to structure their destinations in following way : destinations -> diving destinations -> country (eg. Egypt) -> city (eg. Dahab) -> detailed info (prices, more info, etc.).
Every level had it’s own pages. Some destinations had even more or less sublevels (regions etc.).

This is just a very simple example of structuring content in more than 2 levels deep.
Well with Joomla I just couldn’t fit this in. I tried it in all kind of ways, but it just was a big mess and it became impossible for my client to understand where to add content and how to link this to the menu’s.

In the end I switched to another CMS (I will not call its name again), and I could set this structure up in no time.

Another drawback of joomla is the overload of features. Just take a look at the list of options on the right-hand-side in the admin interface. You can hardly call that dummy-user-friendly… And most of these features are a nightmare to style (via CSS). Hell I think most of these features are (almost) never used. At least not in the Joomla sites I have seen.

Anybody here thinks that Joomla templates are easy to create? Well have you ever tried? Really tried? Not just altering an existing template, but really create a whole new structure that doesn’t resemble the default Joomla way of working? Do you think that those positions and stuff are flexible? Then why do we need books to understand all this? I’m sure that anything is possible, but the learning curve is steep.
What other CMS’ses I just needed to read a short tutorial, or even could figure it out without any help.

Why does Joomla create pieces of HTML that I can not easely change how I want it? Like the TABLE tag mess for all kind of parts (pagination etc.). Yes I can go change the core or I can override by copying and changing parts of the core. But is that developer-friendly? With any other CMS I used until now, I never had to go change core files to get the HTML output I wanted.

And don’t get me started about the Joomla extensions. Even that has been made difficult. Why have modules and plugins? Sure there will be some (historical) reason, but I don’t care really. It’s just confusing. Besides that, I have tried a whole bunch of them, and most are very crappy to say the least.

With Joomla you can surely set up a site in 1 weekend. Even in 1 hour. But that can be done with (almost) any modern CMS. But once you want something other than the defaults, you’re going for a whole other kind of timing.

There is one big advantage of having mastered Joomla… switching to any other CMS will only make your happier

@cccmien (#158)

Anyone who can write valid XHTML/CSS can build Joomla websites…easily.

Regarding your comments here…

“Yes I can go change the core or I can override by copying and changing parts of the core. But is that developer-friendly? With any other CMS I used until now, I never had to go change core files to get the HTML output I wanted.”

There is never any need to touch core files. As you have correctly noted, you can use overrides to prevent touching your core files, but you don’t need to worry about any of that as Joomla comes bundled with a template called ‘Beez’ which essentially outputs everything exactly how you would want it already, i.e, pagination using etc.

‘Beez’ is a good starting point for developing a new template, saving you time. All you do (in the template’s index.php file) is chop-out the whole to code and use your own XHTML/CSS, then add in some simple one line PHP tags to include the core content component, and any modules you need.

When learning to build Wordpress sites, you naturally use ‘Kubrick’ to help you learn how the system works. using ‘Beez’ is no different and makes it easy to learn how to put together a nice accessible template, which essentially only needs 2 files modifying before being ready-to-roll (the index.php and the templateDetails.xml).

“Do you think that those positions and stuff are flexible?”

Yes, incredibly flexible. Here’s an example:

…done.

At the end of the day, Joomla is a framework which if you spend a little time learning, can be shaped in loads of different ways, quickly and efficiently.

Sometimes a CMS like Wordpress just doesn’t fit the bill for certain types of clients who may need a wider spectrum for scalability, including scope for custom applications requiring an MVC framework.

It’s all about choosing the right CMS for the client and thankfully there is a great range of open source systems to choose from, including Joomla.

Something I have noticed recently is the lack of creative design community support for Joomla, i.e, you can find tons of articles/tutorials on Wordpress, but next to nothing on Joomla.

This is something I plan to contribute to in the near future, offering tutorials and tips to help other creative web designers harness some of the useful capabilities Joomla offers as a CMS.

Code missing form above post ^

…is chop-out the whole to

“Yes, incredibly flexible. Here’s an example:”

cccmien -

I think you have a solid understanding of Joomla!’s weaknesses. Joomla! 1.6 is in the works. The following points relate to your comments:

- The Framework will soon be distributed on it’s own – so – those who want to craft their own CMS or CRM or Blog or LS can have at it, without the bloat of the CMS.

- In 1.6, the Polls Component is gone. Web links have a Module that will make it more functional.

- Semantically correct xHTML – table structures are gone (except where it makes sense). Currently, there are three sets of code to choose from – and the community is collaborating on how to merge improvements and where to add FOAF Microformats.

- Multi-layer Categories are in 1.6. Be gone, the Section-Category-Article constraint!

- 4,500 extensions is a bunch and a little bit more. There are indeed extensions out there that are not high quality. And, there are some that are top notch. And so it goes in communities. The more involved you get, the better able you can identity what works for you and what does not. If nothing else, one must recognize such a high level of contribution says something good about how developers feel about Joomla! http://extensions.joomla.org/

One weakness most of us complain about that you did not mention is the limited ACL. Today, Andrew Eddie announced with Revision 11602 http://tinyurl.com/j16acl that ACL improvements are in core 1.6 (more work before it’s done, of course).

Completely *disagree* with you on the difficulty with template development. Time and time, again, people list this as an area of strength for Joomla! and I agree.

To be honest, I don’t have any qualms about the specific analysis cccmien is raising and I challenge him to critique 1.6 when it comes available. His comments are specific – mostly fact based (w a bit of passion for emphasis, but that’s cool), and I am really proud of the Joomla! community since each of the issues he has identified are addressed in 1.6.

It’s pretty tough to fix “evil.” Evil is a broad sweeping generalization with emotional overtones and probably not a good adjective for software. So, I’m just going to assume that what the writer intended to say “Joomla! is badass.” To which I would reply, wait until you see Joomla! 1.6.

Amy

@Amy Stephen (#161)

Sounds like this 1.6 version fixes the biggest issues I had with Joomla. I will surely give it a try when it’s released.

As far as my “passion for emphasis” is concerned, English is not my native language so that might cause some unintended strange emphasis here and there

Anyway personally I would never use the word “evil” for Joomla. The developers put a lot of effort in it, just for us to use is it for free (or not use it anymore in my case). Given the enthousiastic and huge community around it, there must be some good stuff in there that, clearly, I missed.

Regarding the “2 levels deep” topic. Something that people don’t realise in Joomla is that the “navigation” and the “categorisation” is separated and cumulative. The “navigation” is an unlimited depth tree. The categories (for “content”) is limited to 2 levels deep (this will change in 1.6). But here’s the kicker. The categories system “adds” to the navigation system. So your path, as far as the visitor is concerned, can be any number of levels deeps because the category paths come “after” the navigation.

This is just a matter of understanding the system you are working with. No pain, no gain. I personally have a dislike for the Drupal UI, but this is more out of ignorance (and I like the “Joomla-way” – but I’m biased because I help write the software). It’s not that Drupal is bad software (honestly, it’s CCK kicks butt and I’ve, cough, borrow some of their ideas from time to time to put into Joomla) – it’s the fact that I’ve failed to invest the time to learn the nuances of the system.

wow how long of you been in the business….are you even?

Saying Joomla is evil has got to be the dumbest thing Ive ever heard. The things Ive done with it would blow your mind.

And wordpress is worse imo, unless you want just a blog then its kickass. If you want a FULL CMS you don’t want to use wordpress……

Ok everyone I am back to say that Silverstripe rocks! Joomla really helps you learn and understand CMS. Because it has a huge learning curve and you want to learn it so bad the things you do pick up allows you to appreciate other CMS platforms.

So for that thank you Joomla. I still have others site and I will wait to see v1.6. But for now I my creative juices following. Oh and Wordpress dashboard is something to be reckoned with I think! It just makes sense. No guess work – Uuuuuum!?! What do I do now. Just Oh! Ok! NexT!

Lol

WHEW! A lot of Joomla haters out here. I used to use Joomla and switch to WOrdpres for a lot of the same reasons you stated. However, I have read favorable reviews of 1.5, so I don’t think you can completely right it off. Next for me is Drupal before I hope on the joomla train again.

good post! love the discussions..

Hey Jason,

Your article is somehow informative, but it terribly lacks professionalism. Two examples:

1/ Your statement about Linux is really inappropriate, you don’t know Linux that’s for sure. It’s like arguing that if someone dreams of being a great web designer he must HAVE and LEARN Adobe CS. It’s been five years that I use Linux and only Linux for my web design and development projects, I use it as a Mac user uses his Mac or a Windows user uses his PC, you don’t have to be a geek to use Linux; that was in the late 90s. Get an update about that please.

2/ Your statement about Joomla! Although I’m a Drupal fan, but saying that Joomla! is evil really touched my feelings, the feelings of a member of an open source project. I’m now sure that you never contributed to any of the open source projects that let you make money just talking about them, you definitely don’t know what is a community work. The Joomla! community deserves respect, they have a unique and good vision on what a CMS should be. None of the open source CMS’s are perfect, and the fact that they all are free and open source gives us all the precious gift of CHOICE. That precious gift is the result of a devoted hard work from the community, and the community deserves RESPECT. Some respect Jason.

Its a very informative research, thanks for your contribution. I am new to the CMS, world but really really fascinated by it. I have experienced good progress with Drupal and wordpress, so would give positives to those two. Now will check out the rest of the league. Again, good job.

I had lot of experience (real life projects) with many CMS applications (joomla, dotnetnuke, drupal etc). I also used blog software as a cms (wp and expression engine) many times.

Every project has its own needs. The platform choice is depending on the needs, time and budget.

It’s impossible to judge an application after a few look around, unless you have experience in a live project. It’s similar to judging a girl as ’she is a horrible wife’, just after going out with her to drink a coffee.

I used Joomla on several projects. It’s possible to say that Joomla has disadvantages like,

- No custom content types and custom fields
- Not easy to design templates
- Limited frontend support

But Joomla also has a lot of advantages like very nice commercial support, and multilingual content etc. Even wordpress does not have such a high quality commerical support. (especially about templates). If anyone want to see it, just take a look at Joomlart’s web site (a template provider) and see what it’s possible to have with spending a few dollars.

Using blog software as a CMS, is painful. I had lot of bad experiences with Wordpress.

The only exception was, Expression Engine. It provides you 10 times more flexibility than wordpress, if you will use it as a CMS. I had only one project, and I can say that I falled in love.

Joomla is not an evil. It was my lifesaver a lot of times. Every software is evil, if you make wrong choices.

Dotnetnuke is very painful. If you need to use something built on .net, better to choose a commercial alternative like Sitefinity. (they charge nothing for personal edition)

Finally, all of the solutions mentioned here are good alternatives for small to medium sites. But enterprise level web sites need commercially supported solutions. (like Stellent, Ektron etc.)

By the way, it’s very strange that TYPO3 is not mentioned in the article. I think it’s the only one which is a real alternative to commercial CMS applications.

Also, Sava CMS is a nice new alternative if you have Coldfusion knowledge..

Thanks so much for this – really helped me point out what I needed and what I didn’t need in a CMS. I’ve been really impressed with silverstripe. Great short(ish) article.

I’ve got to disagree with you in regards to both DRUPAL and JOOMLA.

I’ve used joomla and drupal both fairly extensively (which is why i now primarily use envotu (www.envotu.com). However in regards to your statements, this is what i’ve found:

You are correct when you say there are hundreds of modules to do the same thing (and it’s hard to find one that fits what you need).

You are correct when you say that alot of the components and modules for joomla cost money. They are commercial (enhancements), and let’s be honest, why shouldn’t the developers of them get a couple bucks from their hard work developing them in the first place. I’ve paid for several components and modules for joomla in order to get it working how i wanted. If i wanted the same functionality but had to code it myself it would cost me much more than i paid (in time of course).

I disagree when you say their interface is difficult to use. I find joomla to have one of the most intuitive interfaces. I can have a site completed in joomla brief my clients on it quickly and send them on their way and not have to worry about anything. They understand it just fine, it’s not a complicated setup at all.

I also disagree in regards to drupal when you say it’s easy and simple to use. Drupal is one of the most complicated systems out there. It’s not NEARLY as easy to create CSS templates for drupal as it is for joomla.

The modules and different types of content types in drupal are also very confusing and hard to use (particularly for clients). I’ve found that not only do drupal sites cost ME more to build, more man hours ect., but they also cost the client much more as well. I have a much higher frustration rate from clients that are on drupal sites than ANY other cms out there.

Drupal is much more powerful than joomla though, that’s 100% accurate. However like previously mentioned i try not to use either of them when i can. Instead i use envotu.

Envotu is not open source it’s commercial, but it includes hosting and all that jazz with it. It’s the easiest system EVER to use by a long shot, for both designers/developers and for clients. It includes more functionallity out of the box that is actually USEFUL, and it’s just an overall amazing system.

Very provocative words and great self-marketing. Now forever destined to come up at the top the the google results for Joomla and evil to anyone who’s trying to dig up dirt.

As with anything good you’ll find lovers and haters so Joomla is no different. One thing I know for certain… is that there’s no perfect answer. In fact if you think about it, they’re all evil. From the designer’s point of view, here’s why:

Wordpress: Evil because it takes longer then Joomla to set up all but the simplest sites. You gotta hard code menus and sidebars after the first one. With Joomla, you have WAY more flexibility with the module system. More design flexibility, more powerful extensions, easier than Wordpress. Doesn’t even compare. And it’s downright Satanic because it’s ecommerce solutions don’t come close to Virtuemart (Joomla extension) even though it’s stated here that WP has ecommerce… But it’s beautiful for blogs and simple sites of all kinds.

Drupal: Evil because even your clients tell you so. Taxonomy what? Was that a node on my spleen? Where? Then it’s downright satanic because it’s so hard template and customize unless you’re a Grandmaster PHP Wizard. But Beautiful because out of these big 3, it’s by far the best system if you REALLY know what you’re doing (and don’t have low budget clients that can’t afford the extra time taken).

Joomla: Evil because there’s so much junk left over from the mambo days and before paying your dues you’ll have to…well you’ve got to pay dues. It’s satanic for it’s horrid url system, ugly nested table code, dumb looking components not updated from 10 years ago, and last but not least… the mindset that important core features are best left to the 3rd party community to make their own mini-kingdoms (resulting in incompatibly issues).

Did I say they have a mindset? Well it’s not up for discussion…and as you noticed they’re here to defend it. But there is a beautiful, and that is things seem to moving in the right direction albeit rather slowly. But even now, almost all of the above can be solved just fine, once you learn the system.

Most of the so-called evil of any CMS can be solved if you spend some time to learn it. They all have a place. Joomla is definitely not evil, and I think this is a silly post by someone who was willing to pontificate before they really knew what they were talking about. As a designer way before a coder, I would say Joomla is by far my favorite CMS and my clients love it too. And as a Joomla fan (but no fan boy) I hope they become more inspired to listen to graphic designers, who’s taste is needed to keep Joomla moving in the right direction.

Thanks for sharing, I think Wordpress is the best for small-medium sized sites.

Although I am about to use it for a community site with the help of some cool plugins

As for Joomla, I couldn’t agree more; although you wrote it in a “Don’t you ever use it” fashion, and I believe that people’s choice should not be influenced by call to action from your side – it’s enough to present the ups and downs

I never used joomla but i can say easily drupal is the best CMS system. Wordpress is not exact CMS system but it is so powerful blogging system.

I think that joomla is not evil at all. From 1.5 version developing templates and managing pages is very simple and intuitive.

Obviously we had spent time to learn it, but i think it’s normal…

Our clients are satisfied by using this CMS.

could someone listing for e-commerce applications here??

I personally like a windows based cms system, like the so called zeta producer (www.zeta-producer.com) who says that a cms must always be webbased? On a webbased cms you need to train your employees to use it, on a standard windows application you don’t need a specialiced training.

I’ve deployed Joomla for Government, Private Companies, Non Profits, Universities, as Intranets, Extranets, of large and small scale.

I have very rarely had to pay for an add-on component because I couldn’t find a suitable free add-on.

For the record, I am also a huge fan of Drupal but in recent years have had only one instance where it was more suitable for a project.

Your dismissal of Joomla was ill-considered and poorly researched.

I’ve now unsubscribed from your feed. I’m sure you won’t miss me.

LooL…
Joomla.Easy=True
Your Joomla: Fails, Reason:
You.nab=true

You.Frustrated=Overflow
You.Add.Items.Item(”Hai Joomla Iz Evul”)

Error
*/Message/*
Fatal Error: You Failed miserably

To show you WHY you failed…
I’ve ran a search on “Free joomla modules” (since you say you have to pay for all of em)
Here’s what came up:
Results 1 – 10 of circa 6.030.000 for free joomla modules (0,13 seconds)
I’ll make it easier for you (since you don’t seem capable of googling something)

http://letmegooglethatforyou.com/?q=free+joomla+modules

Greetings,
A very satisfied Joomla User

I’ve used most of these CMS packages before deciding on the one I would use as my main script for building client sites on.

There is no question that Joomla is the most powerful one out of the bunch. You could not be more wrong about this one.
You don’t know how to use it would be my guess. Thats why you gave the over simplified CMS scripts a higher recommendation. Don’t mistake your lack of knowledge for problems with Joomla.
Check the forums and add-ons for each. Joomla dominates the other packages in available resources from users.
In a professional environment, Joomla is the clear winner.

i usually don’t write the comment, but this time i stopped because of ” joomla! is evil”, this is first time i heard that slogan, i used to hear “open source matters” …. just kidding

i am developing websites with joomla last 3 years and almost used to it, love it,

little background:

3 years before i wanted to learn about cms, blog etc. i knew wordpress was most used, joomla was just born, drupal was there… here is what i found

1. wordpress : i tried at least for some week with some luck i understood it little

2. drupal : impossible for me to learn understand, i tried at least some week no luck

3. Joomla!: the moment i touched it i understood how it works, first website i made with it, took me a while to finish, after 3 years i can develop my own templates, i can make a website less than 2-3 weeks

if i were you i will not do that kind of comments on any cms… may be this is your strategie to make your self talk and bring more traffic …

==========================
just an advice
==========================
when you have a website and you are on net saying something like that can make joomla lovers angry may be you will get hacked! why taking that kind of risk?

Deva – Now, now, now, dear! hehe! I know you meant that tongue in cheek. Seriously, though, I cannot imagine anyone who invests time creating and making available free software wanting to harm someone’s Web site because of differing opinion. Our time is far better spent improving and using our software. Joomla! can be improved – and we are improving it! Once we start thinking it’s as good as it gets, then we would be in trouble.

It has been pretty cool seeing people respond to this post – hearing the critiques and raves – learning about other projects. As you have said, it’s good to try different environments. We learn and think differently – it should come as very little surprise to anyone that we like different CMS’s. Look at the choices our free software communities of volunteers have offered the world – it speaks very highly of our combined efforts.

Joomla evil? Wodpress and Magento a CMS? – mate you better stick to talking about designs and not about CMSs, because it’s clear you don’t have too much experience with it.

I’m a web developer and I’ve had the opportunity of working with most of these – all of them serve their own purpose. Try to be impartial when writing this type of articles. It’s clear you hate Joomla and saying what you said only makes you seem like an ignorant on the subject.

As a hosting provider specialized in cms hosting we can say for our clients the 2 most used CMS systems are Drupal and Joomla. This is for europe.

Wow.. great story, but the “Joomla is evil” comment was harsh. I’ve never used Joomla but have often heard of it’s difficult “configurability”.

Impentation is huge when selecting and CMS and sometimes there is something you want to do, but it takes a little time to figure out how do configure it with the provided admin interface. I think that the layout/output should be 100% customizable, but it seems some CMS’s make this task complex. Often flexibility leads to complexity.

Some other CMS priorities for me:

- publishing content to RSS
- custom fields (beyond the standard Title, Date, Author, etc..)
- approval / workflow
- categorization / hierarchy
- extended funtionality (Web forms, user management, forums, polls, etc..)

Thanks for the insight.

Well, I remember all those discussions in video compositing theme. There are fans of Combustion, Shake, AfterEffects, Fusion etc. There are pros and cons, some have better UI, some do roto better. But what really matters? I think this is architecture of the software. How flexible it is, how can it adopt to meet the needs of enviroment (web in this case). Everything in this field is work in progress. Web changes. Consider years to come.

For the statements of the author, hm, I do not understand people being proud of having biased point of view. Fancy skin but missing merit.

I’ve tried many different CMS systems in the past but prefer overall Wordpress for blogging (mind you, it can be hacked to perform other tasks – CMS type) and MODx which is by far the most logical system available.

The use of chunks (HTML) snippets (PHP) modules, etc etc make it a powerful and flexible system.

Seriously, take a look at nettuts.com in regards to the tutorial, you’ll be impressed!

This is about as much fun as the as the QUark vs. INdesign debate. A bunch of IT geeks feuding over software that ultimately does not work well.

KUDOS to this writer – FINALLY! THE TRUTH!

I *WISH* I had read this 2 months ago, before wasting a fistful of cash on a Joomla developer and this NIGHTMARE of a software package. It is such a scam: use the free until you find it doesn’t work, then shell out for more components.

This has cost me in so much time, aggravation and frustration I cannot tell you. If everyone at Joomla are such geniuses, have they ever heard of standardising the nomenclature, at the very least, so schmo’s like me could work with it?

It makes me so angry that people defend something that should be a tool and serve the needs of the user, not the other way around. I would gladly pay for things that work. Some of us have small business that depend on us being out making deals, sales and creating new opportunities and jobs – not dillying around with crap software, and developers who are learning as they go.

The author is correct: AVOID Joomla at (literally) all costs.

Hi again,

Wow, the comments just keep coming. It seems that a lot of people have gotten angry over my “Joomla! is evil” comment. Although I find it strange that many Joomla! supporters are saying I obviously have no experience with the system just because it failed to meet my expectations.

I could go into detail about my thoughts on the poor structure and UI of Joomla! but just like anything anyone writes, this is my own opinion. It’s just that I’m not sugarcoating any of my thoughts in an attempt to appease supporters of Joomla!. There are good qualities to Joomla!, and the system obviously can be implemented well, as shown by the abundance of sites built with it. This is NOT enough for me. I cannot with the my knowledge, having used even the most recent versions of Joomla!, suggest it to anyone who wishes to design websites with ease.

Many of the people who have commented disagree however, and for that reason I suggest that anyone who is doubting my opinions, as is only natural, to go and work with the system for a while. It can be installed fairly easily, and if it works for you then great, if not you were warned. Either way, feel free to come back and post your thoughts for other readers.

Martin you have been ripped off by a cheep developer, probably from abroad and now your miffed as you didn’t pay full costs. that’s not Joomla’s fault, thats you not researching properly into if the developer can handle what they say they can!!

I charge between £40 and £50 per hours and I’m fully booked until the middle of may, i mainly in Joomla, but have used many other CMS systems. But many stupid one man bands pay £5ph on scriptlance or joomlancers and then complain when it all falls apart.

Jason you say
“There are good qualities to Joomla!, and the system obviously can be implemented well”
well that’s correct so why don’t you say those good qualities in your review? That’s whats annoyed people, a review shows the good and the bad, you haven’t, you have just vented your anger from an obvious bad experience and slagged off a system which is used hugely across the globe. You may have pushed somebody away from using a very extensive system into using a blog system which doesn’t work as a business tool.

For gods sake your copy advices people to use a blog admin system like word press over the top of a commercial ecommerce, blog, forum, gallery, chat, article system.

If your building a website for anybody, then you are trying to build a business tool that’s expandable and able to cope with the future needs of the business. The difference between a true developer and a pretend one (somebody who learnt dreamweaver and is now a professional web designer) is that a developer will look at the work as providing a true business asset, not something that they can throw together in a few days and run away from with no after sales support or backup.

About 50% of my time is spent with the client working out exactly what they do and don’t need, so i don’t make a site which is too complex and over made, or miss elements out that could draw in revenue or exposure.

A website for a business is not a toy, in many cases it could be the difference between trading and job losses, so even if the setting up (which is done by the developer not the end user) is a little more complex, then so be it, if the results are what they need.

Madness!!!

It’s a really great idea to bash the most popular cms with the largest community and the operating system with the most zealous userbase to attract some attention.

Regarding joomla, after configuring all the categories and sections in the administration panel for the client, the clients can just login as editors in the frontend and add new articles or edit existing ones without ever seeing the complex administrator interface. There is an edit icon near each article that can be clicked to edit it – what can be simpler?

Interesting article and some great responses…

When I came to the point of moving beyond the static sites only kiddy pool I set out to pick a CMS framework. There are literally scores of these systems. I found that some of the “lite” systems were too light, with not enough modules, not enough people pushing the design envelope, and not enough users in the community forums.

The big systems like Drupal or Wordpress had just to the opposite: too much of everything. I found the forums not that great for new users as well.

In the end I chose MODx. Very, very flexible, with a great layout and a great forum community. You also get to see the MODx document tree which shows all your pages, their parents and children etc. I find is easy to design a static test page, get it running and the CSS figured out and then use that to create your MODx template. Its a great CMS for a designer…

Interesting article. However, you lost me when you included WP and Magento in the CMS section and omitted some true CMS like MODx, TYPO and CMSMadeSimple. WP can be used as a CMS but it is not a CMS, and Magento is clearly eCommerce. And if you are including iWeb then why not DreamWeaver? I agree on the Joomla issues, but it is not all evil. I know many extremely competent developers who support Joomla and they have happy clients. I would avoid it personally, but as a developer I understand why it sucks, to the end user if it works it is golden. As a designer I would avoid Joomla since you will not have total control over the look (at least not without much effort). But you need to be fair, Joomla (and Mambo) made popular the Open Source CMS way back before all the others mentioned (maybe with the exception of Drupal) were even ideas, so that they would have an outdated resource library is not unheard of.

Since you are not limiting the scope of the article to open source (free) then why not include commercial CMS like Expression Engine.

Personally I use MODx, it fills all my requirements and goes way beyond my expectations.

Anyway, the points on choosing the right CMS are good.

Great article.. thanks

Your article is very helpful.
Thank you for spread your thought.

Regards,
/RobinTh

Well I just read through all the article and wanted to post a little more.

Joomla is evil.. I probably spent about 15-20 hour wrestling with it and asked my self why?
Usally I download a CMS and it is fun to play with and learn, Not Joomla just a confusing layout and Bulky… 3000 files or something.. Like a Giant Winnebago full of boxes of junk..

I really love Wordpress and Drupal but Wordpress is not really a CMS and Drupal is hard for a client to use maintain so I am looking around at some others.

Thank for the good read it has given me some idea, I thnk I will try out Silverstrip and Frog and see how they are.

Come on…. To the guy who spend 15-20 hours with Joomla. If you want easy, use iWeb just like the author suggests. But if you need your website to do more (which I thought was the purpose of learning a CMS), systems like Joomla will always be there for you. There’s no free lunch. The program is big and may have a steeper learning curve than iWeb or Wordpress becuase it does more.

Want to learn to use the big tools? Then be prepared to invest some time. And why not invest the time? Don’t you want to offer more to your customers or clients? Are you the type that also figures dropping out of school is a great idea because it’s too much work?

It’s the author’s right to use the evil word even though he admits tens of thousands of successful websites have been created, just as it’s my right to scream fire in a crowded theater. I can do it, but if there’s no fire I’m not going to be very well received am I? I think it’s important to try and remember many people’s hard work, volunteer time and even livelihoods are being hurt (clients like Martin have already ran screaming) by stuff like this.

Coming from someone who’s used a good number of these tools, Joomla works fine, just as do most of the other systems as long as they meet your needs. Only a few systems have the community and advanced extensions that Joomla has. Will you have to dig a little at first? Yes, but after a little digging you’ll find. Nuff said.

After over a year of using Joomla, I came to that conclusion last week. I’ve spent many a late night searching and then attempting to get components working to nail what the client wanted. Something would always not work, I was beginning to feel cursed by Joomla. I can program PHP well, and it was difficult trying to make Joomla fit what we wanted. I am happy to read this, and can’t wait to try these other CMS options. Thanks!

Be clear that the article refers to the Web CMS area only. For the more complex tasks of managing content components, you need a CCMS (component content management system). That hasn’t been addressed here at all. That’s fine, but for those who don’t know the difference, it’s important to make that distinction.

I love that SilverStripe is built on a framework, which is available to developers. Although not free (for commercial use), expression engine is a great CMS. It has powered some really great sites, and it is built on top of the code ignitor framework.

From a developers standpoint, one thing that is important is the flexibility and consistency of the code. The CMS can be the most powerful out there, but if the underlying core is not solid and flexible the CMS will inevitably be unstable and a poor choice.

In terms of core architecture I would rank the CMS’s like this (arguing that Wordpress is, in fact, a CMS, as it does effectively manage content, limited as it might be)-

1. Expression Engine
2. SilverStripe
3. Wordpress
4. Sava (a ColdFusion open-source CMS)
5. Drupal
6. Joomla

While Joomla might be ok for the client, it often will create a nightmare for the website developer (finding plugins, fighting xss, etc), so in the end it is important to find something that has a solid architecture and is friendly for the developer as well as the client.

Finding the right CMS depends upon a whole host of factors, from requirements through to technical competence of the content editors. There is no one-size fits all and everybody’s mileage will vary when using the same CMS.

However, I would never – repeat never – recommend Magento as a CMS. As an ecommerce platform it’s brilliant but it doesn’t even have the beginnings of a proper, standalone CMS. To suggest otherwise, as this article does, shows a limited understanding of Magento and CMS in general.

Drupal is great but setting up a Drupal site is beyond the technically limited user. If you’re on a shared server with limited rights to control things such as php.ini etc, then it can be impossible to even install. If you have register_globals turned on, Drupal won’t install, for example.

Drupal also has a 1001 extensions or modules. Drupal.org is not the easiest place to find the right module either and for the beginner it’s really hard to know what module is right for the job in hand. But then that’s one reason why people pay professionals to do their website – the knowledge and experience.

Designing for Drupal is not easy – period!

Joomla is easier to install in my opinion – it is less picky about the register_globals for example, but will suggest that you turn it off – and feels like its more geared towards the low-middle hosting spectrum and the less technically able user.

Joomla’s limited content hierarchy is actually a boon in some cases. Deep navigation hierarchies do not always lend themselves to ease of use and content findability. I like the fact that Joomla means I have to keep my site navigation shallow and I’m sure it doesn’t hurt my Google rankings either.

Joomla’s lack of ACL is frustrating but is on the road map. If you’ve not tried Joomla recently, you ought to give Joomla 1.5 a try – its much improved on 1.0.

I’ve also used modX – a client asked me to look after her modX site because its UI was too confusing for her. It took me sometime to get around it. Yes its powerful, but its not for the non technical user. This was a classic case of mismatch.

Radiant – I’m a Rails fanboy but try to get Rails hosting for a reasonable price! Also, way beyond the average user.

Don’t let your designer choose your CMS and don’t let anyone in your sales team buy a CMS either – all suckered in by the eye candy! I heard of a sales team that recently bought a bespoke CMS from a design agency, only for the developer to later discover it can’t handle image uploads!

Selecting a CMS is a technical requirement – you need something that will fit on your platform, can interoperate with other systems if required. You also need to think about present (& future) information architectures – can the CMS accommodate them? Can it handle all the Web2.0 stuff? Don’t expect your designer to know this and don’t trust them if they say they do!

Finally, you think Joomla is difficult – wait ’til someone asks you to build a website using LiveLink WCM or Sharepoint! Then come back and lets us know about clunky interfaces, finding the right component, etc, etc!

If you want fair, detailed rather than scattershot reviews of different WCM/CMS systems, do some googling, or pick through CMS Report.

A relatively recent goodie:
http://cmsreport.com/content/drupal-joomla-wordpress-comparison

The document mentioned there is a partial aid to people new to Drupal, Wordpress or Joomla where the biggest hurdle and frustration is figuring out how to do X, Y, and Z. “Do I need a module for that? Which one is best? What do you mean it depends?”

Other commenters are right that Magento is not a CMS, and neither is Wordpress. Drupal and Joomla are not really CMSes either, especially compared to WP or Concrete5 which do content–and only content–really well. Drupal and Joomla are more like application frameworks that can be built out and extended to do things way beyond content management. With Joomla you can do a lot more fast, and without being a programmer, with a much more gradual learning curve compared to Drupal.

When it comes to content, Drupal is strong (and deeply complex) because it has a very expansive concept of content and modules are very well integrated with each other and the core. If you don’t need that, however, then Drupal is likely to seem needlessly, overly complex. Wrong tool for the job in that case.

For Joomla, content means page code stored in the database tables used by the core content component. If that’s good enough for you and the main thing you want to do is tie in phpBB3, phpList or an integrated newsletter, a slick events or gig calendar, etc. using a hot template that doesn’t look like a blog — you can do all this in a very short time at little or no cost with Joomla.

I suppose that was a little confusing on WP. I meant WP is a blog that has gotten very big (possibly too big and heavy in WPmu), but it is still fundamentally a blog.

Blogs manage content very well. In fact, WP manages content much better than Joomla and is in many ways easier to operate (for content management) than Drupal of Joomla. So WP has a claim to being a CMS on that basis.

But if you want to try to build a community site on WP or just integrate a forum, get ready for pain. Access control and permissions on WP are terribly limited.

Joomla has a claim at being a CMS because its content component gives it the functionality to create and manage content. Most people who use Joomla are more interested in other components, not so much com_content. A lot of those components are basically standalone applications tied into Joomla’s core framework.

There are a lot of workarounds for com_content’s limitations, but sometimes it is not the right tool for the job. Or else you need to add the right tool to Joomla.

It’s interesting that the gaps in Joomla’s content managing powers have not been a major focus for third-party developers, but now there is suddenly a big contribution that makes an explicit reference to Drupal as “CCK for Joomla” —
http://www.yootheme.com/blog/item/root/cck-for-joomla

That suggests some positive cross-fertilization between very different software lumped together under the “CMS” category by people who are probably taking the time to understand how these very different tools work.

It’s the first time I read something bad about Joomla! I use it for several years now and with the new Version 1.5 it even got way better. Wondering why Typo3 is not listed – it’s most famous CMS I know but way to complex for smaller sites (that why I use Joomla!). Wordpress is not a CMS – it’s a blog. I also use that too and like it very much – but as a blog. [from Germany]

I popped back in to reply to a new comment I got by email, but it’s not here now…???

The author said: “Actually considering how much harping on has happened here, i haven’t seen any Professional” programmers who have slated Joomla but supported Drupal, note that most of the programmers that work on work on Joomla also work on Drupal. This is because the systems are both very much different in what they are set out to do.

But both projects are very friendly and work together….”

Joomla’s kind note of congratulations to Drupal 6 was also referenced:
http://www.joomla.org/announcements/general-news/4585-congratulations-to-drupal.html

I just wanted to ask, has anyone built an integrated (single sign-on) Joomla and Drupal site? And documented the process? Please post if you have, or email me.

The friendship between Drupal and Joomla! goes both ways. http://drupal.org/node/213524 Anyone who seriously contributes to a free software project respects others who are also so engaged. Personally, I have many friends from the Drupal community and nothing but respect for their work.

If you are happy with a off the shlef solution then there are so many you would have trouble waving a stick at them all. And they can be good… some even CSS driven…

Bu the problem for me is they will only ever do a percentage of what you want. yeah you can modify most of them now being open source and all, but then you run into bugs in THERE system is just easier to make your own, especially if you have a very specific requirement.

I am one that despises Jommla as well. I work for a University and an organization “was” using it. It was hacked on three different occasions. Joomla has some serious security flaws. Anyway just my opinion. The thing about opinions are everyone has one. LOL

We use our own CMS, also available as Open Source, see http://www.grafxsoftware.com, Company Website Builder.

I’ve been using MODx (http://www.modxcms.com) exclusively for years. It’s extremely powerful and flexible. It takes a bit of a learning curve as the designer/programmer to learn it at first, but once you get it, it’s so powerful…it’s helped me grow my business quite a lot.

good discussion.
i write from Italy.
but…. but… all mega-developer inside? no base-users?

and for customers who do not speak English?
WORLD….all people does not speak English !!! (i’m one of this, for sure)

Joomla is multi-language with very good community and many components.

other? (drupal, modx,ecc.ecc.)

bye!

“A Content Management System (CMS) is a Web application that uses a database (usually MySQL) or other methods to create, edit, and store HTML content in a manageable way.”

This description entirely explains why this blog post misses the boat. A CMS need not be a web application, doesn’t need to use a database and would work with far more content than HTML pages. In fact, HTML and Content are not even in the same category. HTML, or HyperText Markup Language, is a markup (presentation) device for content, which exists outside of presentation.

Your “Common Mistakes” and “What to look for” points are quite simplistic and certainly wouldn’t apply beyond a personal choice. In fact, the only valid point is the mistake of not doing research. You present your choices of the best solutions, but no case for any of them, which is really poor research.

There are never any “Best” or “Worst” options in choosing any application or solution. Best and worst only exist in the relationship of the organization’s needs, goals and resources. Best and worst can only be best and worst for a specific situation. Which is why appropriate research, with the involvement of the appropriate parties, is the only way to decide on the proper content management solution.

I would disagree with you that Joomla is not flexible. Joomla 1.5 is the easiest of all the Content Management Systems to template out. Plus it’s built on an MVC based framework that makes component development a breeze. When all you need to do to is simply add a tag to define a module position I think that is incredibly simple.

Yes there are a ton of modules solving the same problem and you’ll see the same thing with Wordpress or even Drupal.

Drupal is a huge pain in the ass to template and there isn’t a clear separation of code and templates like there is with Joomla 1.5.

I could easily apply just about everything said about Joomla to Drupal. Both of those systems are bloated, dated, and overly cumbersome.

The only people I know currently designing sites in Joomla and/or Drupal are people who either: 1.)paid a ton on education for those systems; 2.)are forced by clients/employers to use the systems; and/or 3.)are creatures of habit who are not comfortable exploring new systems.

The reality is this: newer and better systems are going to continue to come out practically every day. The key to finding an ideal system is finding one that is object-relational and modular in its core design, has a strong developer community, is forward-thinking in its functionality, and allows users to conveniently do the things they need to do. If you’re using a CMS that is rigid or has even a whiff of stale air about it, do yourself and your clients a favor – move on to another system NOW.

I am looking for an advisor to help me select a CMS and a website developer.

The advisor should have experience with popular CMS’s such as Joomla, Drupal, Word Press, Sliver Stripe, and MODx. He/she should also have extensive development experience.

My website will have extensive survey capabilities, ability to generate charts and graphs from the survey results, download the survey responses to Excel, a database of survey questions and responses, a Blog, FTP capabilities, RSS feeds, and more.

Please respond if you are able and willing to help.

You have to ask yourself if the Author dissed Joomla! just to get such a massive response, if so = laim.

Joomla is as difficult as YOU make it. It can also be as simple. Its a real beauty for plug and play but it falls down when you want to come out of the box. How can the developers, whom I know personally, ever know every single way someone would use their plug ins or core system.

For me Joomla is a great start and a fantastic finish. Start off you can buy or download a template for free, customise it a little, plugin the relevant tools and your off. Its that simple.

If your an experienced coder you can get under the hood and the MVC framework that Joomla uses gives you complete control. With the evolution up to 1.5 Joomla did a massive step forward and will continue to.

Excellent advice. I followed the same lines on choosing a CMS and I have chosen Typolight (www.typolight.com).

It is very fast and it has been nominated at the Most promising CMS award at Packt a couple of times

One more thing, I hate Joomla, I used to use it when it was Mambo.

Haha what a flaming post. Great self-marketing on the ” avoid Joomla ” indeed.
I recognize some Joomla flaws though, and in that (content for example) Drupal kicks ass.

One thing though, the one who is going to say wich CMS is best is not you is your client.

And so far it’s like only Joomla exists and nothing else. I have clients that like to browse the Joomla Extension Directory (the one you complained) and install the extensions themselves.

And what about templating, Joomla feels to be years ahead!
I can make something in a few hours, I even do some changes in front of clients!
Drupal is too complicated for that. Show me at least 5 pretty templates for Drupal and you will convice me the opposite.

And I mean good downloadable ones, so we don’t depend much on the webbdesigner/developer argument, since a good developer can do anything in any CMS.

Again, every CMS has it’s benefits and before doing your project you should do a study case to see which one will fit your needs better.

To conclude, check this out:
http://cmsshowdown.com/competition
Scroll down and check the table.

There you will get a good idea of each CMS ups and downs.

Great article! And Great Comments. It cleared lots of confusion.

Thanks
Patrik

You: Oh Steve Jobs your shrivelled knob tastes so good oh mmm etc.

I’ve seen the crap iWeb churns out. It’s like everything Apple makes – it might look nice but it’s expensive (here I mean resource heavy). At least you have presented other options, but saying iWeb will be the best choice for everyone is laughable

Cool… Concrete5 looks innovative… I will check it.

I’m a Drupal guy, so thanks for #1 But you missed TYPO3, Plone (although its with Python and Zope), CMSMadeSimple.
As for Magento, it seems quite good for e-shops but hey, there’s Ubercart ^^
Radiant also looks good but where will you find ROR developers?
And Joomla! is not THAT evil, I think.

hey its always 5+5 in ur captcha, do something about it

I haven’t used many of the CMS above because I’m a really busy guy, but I tell you this. The whole idea about CMS is the user being able to change an image and update content, everything else is a job for the web designer, web master, sys admin, etc. If the user can do it is great but 95% of them don’t have an idea.
About the joomla comment, I respect it but you are wrong. I’ve used some CMS’s and so far joomla is the most powerful.
1. If you don’t know how to create a template, you can buy one and they are customizable
2. You have thousands of plug-ins, and modules to do the unthinkable for FREE
3. There are tutorials everywhere about joomla
4. And the most important, SUPPORT. You have people from all over the world to give you an answer. Every time I had a problem I go to the forum, post it and I get an answer right away.
People, any of the CMS’s are perfect, and all of them have to be improved in some way, in fact I use them according to the necessity of the client. Other than that, good article, now I know of the existence of other CMS to try.

Results from Drupal v. Joomla Survey Available

We have completed a survey of professional developers about the strengths and weaknesses of Joomla and Drupal. We received about 200 responses.

We hope survey will add some needed objectivity and refocus the debate on which CMS is most appropriate for particular problems rather than which CMS is “the best.” The survey covers a variety of topics including ease of use, extensibility, the quality of documentation, and more. The data collected from the Drupal vs Joomla survey is intended to help people determine which CMS is best for their project.

The survey results are available in a couple different formats. For more information view our blog post anouncing the results of the Drupal vs. Joomla Survey.

My partner and I have recently released a new content management system…I would love for people to test it out/review it/ break it/ really do anything with it. Feel free to email me about it!

http://www.pagelime.com

Demo-Video
http://www.pagelime.com/about/demo-video/

tom[at]pagelime.com

Folks, try to use Surreal CMS http://surrealcms.com/. It the simplest CMS ever. It turns your HTML designed page into CMS with just one little modification in HTML code.

I agree with Oblikovanje: SurrealCMS is wonderful. I was the 12th commenter on this post, and have discovered SurrealCMS since then. It allows you to load your stylesheet so that users can keep the page looking good, and allows users to upload photos. I’m transferring my clients from Cushy to Surreal.

Thanks to a good explanation ..

Comparing Surreal to Cushy, Surreal is much better without limiting the features of a free user, so with the 3 free websites you can do much more within Surreal.

For me Frog is lightweight CMS champ. I just hope that it will be developed into heavier divison.

i’ve been using several CMS – nothing compares to JOOMLA!

it has tons of components, modules, plugins and templates.

so flexible and powerful.

its just a matter knowing it better.. and your good to go!

i totally disagree with your opinion, sorry..

peace!

but a good start for exchanging experiences with CMS!

…..no matter what, i’m with JOOMLA!

hello

read your article, and must say that your review of joomla is a bit week. joomla has changed alot since your article and commercial or not, what you pay for is support on setting up and getting updates.
why not pay if you are not a developer?!?!

I think a lot of people have things completely upside down. Your biggest mistake is in looking at it strictly from YOUR, the coder/designer, side of the argument. In the end it is the user/client who will be forced to swallow the garbage they’ve been promised would answer their problems. Just because you can code your way out of a box means absolutely ZERO to the poor schmuck who has to wade through non-existent documentation and pencil-necked retorts on so called “help” forums in order to fight with their “solution”.

Whatever platform you settle on it absolutely has to be drop dead drool proof simple! Nobody has the time to diddle around when real work has to be done. They want something that works and it has to damn well work right NOW! I’ve had the pleasure and pain of being seduced by Joomla but if it were not for hosts that provided automated installs of this bright and shining lie I would tell others to stay the hell away. The back end is simply a mess. It reminds me of the joke of where you’re told a camel is a horse designed by committee. Wordpress? That has improved a lot but I wouldn’t call it a CMS, not yet at least, but it too in the past has had quite a fair amount of problems yet they appear to have stronger hands leading development.

In the end, as I’ve said earlier, all the fitful shouting about which is best, and the orgy of comments about this or that CMS, is quite meaningless. Find your end users and sit them down at the screens THEY will have to work with and if they can’t figure it out quickly then move on to the next until it flows for THEM…. narrow it down to the one that meets THEIR needs first and yours second and don’t waste any more time being cute or “creative”. It’s as simple as that.

“Whatever platform you settle on it absolutely has to be drop dead drool proof simple!”

So what in your mind is so simple… Wordpress? Concrete5? Anything? I’ve personally never seen what you’re talking about, but would love to be clued in if you know the holy grail.

Hardly anyone disagrees that easy to use isn’t highly desirable. The thing is, like everything humanity does…. there’s an evolution that needs to take place before we get there. What I want to know is when is life going to get drop dead drool proof simple dang it? Which developer/blogger(s) we blame for that???

Drool proof is great, but not when simplicity sacrifices the functionality you need. In those cases, as in when we become doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc. (there’s no software I know about that will pass the bar for me), we invest in learning in order to achieve our goals. Is it really expected that we shouldn’t have to learn anymore in order to meet our needs?

“I think a lot of people have things completely upside down. Your biggest mistake is in looking at it strictly from YOUR, the coder/designer, side of the argument.”

But have you also considered that time is money when you build or have someone build your site? Most clients, among other concerns, are concerned about budget. Wordpress (for example) may be fairly simple to operate out of the box, but it can take much longer to develop anything design or functionality wise beyond a basic blogging site. It can be done, but simply is not the most efficient system to use if you don’t want a blog looking/acting type of site or if you need more complex features. This is what makes Joomla great in my book. The flexible module system for creating different looks and menus on different pages, and the 3rd party extensions which can’t be beat in open source.

Basically as mentioned many times by many people, most of Joomla’s perceived shortcomings are based on lack of knowledge. A simple trick or an extension solves almost every problem I encounter. Not that it can’t get better… but I just find it to be the best balance of functionality vs. ease of use for me AND my clients. I think there’s a good reason why close to 1% of the whole internet is on Joomla (I think Al Gore said that). But you get to choose what’s best for you…

“the orgy of comments about this or that CMS, is quite meaningless.”

That’s a pretty bold statement to state that the passions, reputations, and livelihoods of so many people are meaningless. Frankly this kind of negativity reminds me of the health care debate and people like Sarah Palin yammering about “death panels”. A few people with a lack of understanding (but with a loud voice) spread their views, and pretty soon “monkey say, monkey do”.

What I can see in your assessment is a lazy web designer! Anyone who would call Joomla anything but the most powerful and capable CMS is someone who wants it done for them.

The problem with anyone complaining about one system over the other (referring to the top of the line CMS) is they have NO idea or underlying education in what makes the CMS run in the first place.

To anyone who criticizes Joomla I say this. Go back to school and learn html, CSS and basic PHP and stop trying to find a CMS that holds your hand to do everything for you because you are either uneducated or to lazy to get in and work the code. I have over 400 clients using it and have only had 2 that were unable to get it.

If it was easy to create websites then everyone on this list would be out of a job! To anyone who reads this persons sob story. If you believe his crap, then you may as well tie your hands behind your back and get a web host that offers a website tool to use.

To any retard that would say Joomla does not render good code. You have absolutly no understanding of the CMS and it is just as well you go with some lame CMS like Frog or Concrete5. LOL the two worse CMS’s on the web!

I agree that Joomla has its issues but to blame the CMS for some of the crap code that is created to install into it. Really shows your ignorance and total lack of education.

Who ever owns this site, validate it! Because it SUCKS!

Kevin,
when Joomla beats Drupal, let me know

Contorra
The problem with this thread, and what made me lose all respect for this author in every way, is that he is trying to compare things that are not “like for like” and then arguing the point.

Drupal is an amazing piece of software, and many of the developers of Joomla are also developers at Drupal. but Drupal and Joomla are both set out to do different things.

This “review” has compared, wordpress with drupal and Joomla as well as many others. Its a bit like comparing a motorbike a car and a van, they all have wheel an engine and can carry people, but in different ways.

Joomla is extremely powerful and can do some wonderful things, but the reason people struggle with it, is because it has so much you can do, the management is a little cluttered. But what the author here and other people have not seen is that most of these can be turned off (Unpublished), so they don’t show in the administration system. So all they see is what they need.

Also regarding the code it produces, depends on how you have it setup as kevin quite rightly pionts out. The entire Joomla and VirtueMart system produces what ever code the templates you add creates. If you wanted you could literally have a blank HTML page with just the output from the content you add into the edit box as raw html. Joomla allows you to add sub templates, so every part of it, is completely customizable.

The templates you get as default are not meant to be used for every project you use it for, they just show the features it has included so you can then create your own.

I hope this helps
Ian

I doubt that will ever happen. Don’t get me wrong I have nothing against other CMS’s, in fact I design for and use many of them. My issue here is those who form an opinion when they have limited knowledge and ability!

To say a CMS that is as popular as Joomla is crap and “Evil” is total ignorance. What is evil is the many extensions that have been developed that are crap and have no business being apart of it.

I would think that the Joomla team would be as scrupulous about trash extensions as they are about keeping everyone within the boundaries of the GPL licence. Then I could without any reservation say anyone who thinks Joomla sucks is truly a newbie developer or just plain lazy!

That said Drupal rocks as does many of the other CMS’s available. Limited as they may be, they fit a niche that makes them a great tool. Just as Joomla fills a niche only it is capable of filling many niches where Drupal and most others cannot unless you can code for them yourself. Great if you can but time limits what needs to be done and Joomla has a community that surpasses every other CMS that is available…

Sorry but it looks like you have been taping this post only to bash on joomla, have you had any bad luck with it ? i mean even total strangers (my experience) get along with joomla after a few explanations. the way you speak about it made me close your window ! you should do the same.

Anyone want to talk about US Health Care Reform?

Did someone say health care reform?

In the Joomla community, man oppresses man with the contemporary torture device, the user interface. With Drupal and Wordpress, the reverse is true.

Hmm… the ONE thing I can say about this site is that they allow a little off topic bantering, something (in the right measure) always good for the soul. This is very much UNLIKE, cough… the “righteous” Joomla forums. Ah em…

Of course, our bantering is the exact reason this article was created. We all know that…

I don’t think WordPress’s interface oppresses or is oppressed. It’s just a bit more limited in function but it feels good, like a comfy chair.

Check out Joomla! and Drupal nighties if you want to see where things are heading in the next release.

Joomla! 1.6 nightly http://dev.joomla.org/nightly/joomla_trunk/joomla_trunk_svn.tar.gz

Drupal 7 nightly http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-7.x-dev.tar.gz

Aside from being a big Joomla! and Drupal fan, I think you can’t beat WordPress for blogging. It’s the world champion of blogging, bar *known* and future plans for pulling together WP and WPMU and BuddyPress will turn heads.

Silverstripe is certainly worth a look. Everytime I look at that software, I am more and more impressed. I think they are still a year or two from seriously competing with Joomla! and Drupal but rapidly heading in good directions. In terms of slick interface, they have Joomla! and Drupal beat. In terms of extensibility, still work to do, I think.

It is unclear to me how Concrete 5 made this list. Seriously. Confused.

Became a wordpress addict, after using Joomla, and stopped with Joomla complete when 1.5 came out. It was ok, but i do agree that there are too many buggy modules, with insufficient community suppport.

Wordpress’s code is just way way more simpler, looking forward to more CMS functionality in the future, but i do realise wordpress is primarily a blogging platform.

Yes wordpress by far is the best cms. Joomla is just a waste of time. Great post!

Comment 250 will win a major prize right?
Cause I’m (at least originally) an IT guys ánd a Joomla fan.
I’d better hit the shelters for a while