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Why choose Joomla as your CMS? |
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Sunday, 19 June 2011 |
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You need to do a lot of research before you can get your head round what
is the right option, in reality there is plenty to learn regardless of
the CMS package you choose.
Joomla is a CMS and therefore has strengths on content delivery and theming.
It can be made to look however you like but bear in mind that by
customising it too much to look like a non-CMS site you can be losing
the benfits of having a content based system.
If you are going to be building a new site then it is best to take a
visual lead from an existing site then make it fit the Joomla model, not
the other way round.
Joomla is the right choice if you decide to go for it. It won't ever be
the wrong choice as you will learn how to create, maintain and optimise
a CMS site. There are better CMS for particular needs, Drupal is better
for content categorisation, ACLs and is more scaleable and as such may
be better suited for big news sites (similar to BBC news). Sharepoint is
better for intranets and project organisation. There are others that
have strengths in particular areas. People will sing the praises of
their own preferred CMS but that comes down to largely the fact that
they started on that one first.
CMS are like cars, they all have four wheels, can be steered, some go
faster than others. Joomla is good because it is open source and also
because it has a massive thriving community, ie. anyone can fix it and
you don't need to keep going back to a main dealer.
Joomla is right for you if you want to be able to make the site
look good, if you want ease of update and plenty of extensions to give
you comments, reviews, forums, SEF friendly pages &c.
Those are some of the pros. Joomla has one significant reason against
choosing it as a solution and that it the upgrade path. Joomla, so far, has
shown that there is no upgrade path from one major version to another.
Each
major version is a migration which can mean a site rebuild from
scratch, also
the structure tends to change in some major respect so
all your old extensions
stop working on the new version. This can lock
you into an old version.
Personally I think this is a significant reason for
not choosing Joomla if you
want a website that will need minimal work
in the future choose something else.
Taking on Joomla basically means
a new site every three or so years
Having said this, all the other competitor CMS may have a similar policy
towards
upgrades, the thing to look for here is backward compatibility.
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