Joomla is an award-winning CMS that allows you to create websites and powerful online applications. In the past 13 years, Joomla has won nearly 20 awards. Downloaded more than 50 million times, Joomla has become one of the most used CMS in the last 6 years. It is currently the second most popular CMS solution after WordPress.
One of the main advantages of Joomla is that it supports the object-oriented programming language, which provides developers with maximum convenience to code their programs without any hassle. The elegant administration area offered by Joomla is simply incredible. Gives you the perfect experience of robust navigation and smooth functionality. The two templates, Protostar and Beez3, also include some new features that give you an elegant framework to work with.
If used correctly, it's a very powerful website building framework. Another good news is that with the release of the new version, Joomla has made some excellent improvements to the security framework, providing users with page and password hashing, multilingual compatibility, new RSS feed application and microdata documentation with MediaWiki working efficiently on the backend. There is always another side to an image. I covered the good side in the previous paragraph.
Now is the time to highlight the bad things: the gaps in Joomla. There are many reasons that count when it comes to realizing that Joomla lags behind WordPress and other CMS on some important fronts. Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of those areas, where Joomla tends to perform quite poorly compared to other CMS, especially WordPress. Although the development team behind Joomla is working hard, there is a lot of room for improvement when it comes to SEO.
Another bug in Joomla is its repository of plugins and extensions. Although there are more than 7,700 extensions available, their functionality is restricted and many are outdated. In addition, there are hardly any as popular as those in the WordPress repository. The lack of regularly updated Joomla extensions has severely affected the overall functionality of the CMS.
Joomla developers need to work extensively to increase the number of user-friendly extensions in the repository. A common perception among ordinary users is that installing Joomla is a cumbersome process and working on it is even more difficult. The biggest disadvantage that hinders Joomla's current position among other CMS programs is that it doesn't provide anything new to users. The core functionality is fragile and is still based on old traditional semantics.
The CMS, in general, hasn't evolved as expected to such an extent, where Joomla could have challenged the supremacy of WordPress or Drupal, etc. According to this W3Techs chart, Joomla is in a very strange position. It is not used by “many sites” nor is it used by “high traffic sites”. Its position in the market as a CMS for “fewer sites” with “little traffic” is a sign of danger.
The most disturbing part is that Joomla's decline is real. Over the past year, its market share fell from 3.25% to almost 3%. This means that Joomla development talent is also shrinking, as is the possibility of inducing new talent. This downward trend has forced Joomla experts to worry about the future of Joomla.
The ongoing debate also casts doubt on its future and its ability to live up to the expectations that developers had of this easy-to-use content management system. Again, I must say that Joomla developers should focus on introducing modifications to the core functionality of the CMS, providing new avenues for users to explore in depth all the possibilities if they want to run an online business on Joomla. It will take time, but once you take the right step in the right direction, Joomla will be able to reap the benefits. Read the quote from Kaushal Patel's answer to Would Joomla be a good way to create a website for a new business? on Quora Read the quote from Frederike Ramm's answer to Would Joomla be a good way to create a website for a new business? on Quora Lower trends in Joomla market share may indicate the worst case scenario for Joomla as a CMS, but there is still a glimmer of hope for Joomla as an application platform.
Well, think of a future where Joomla is an application platform, rather than a full CMS. The new version of Joomla should emphasize the marketing of Joomla as an application platform, with some new features, each independent of the main Joomla code. This will provide a much cleaner and easier to use infrastructure to work with for appreciated Joomla lovers. Developers have a key role to play in this regard.
That said, Joomla faces some serious threats. Developers are required to research and improve coding features, making them easy for the ordinary Joomla user to use. The extension repository needs a full review. Meanwhile, search engine optimization techniques also need to be improved.
In a way, Joomla is more flexible than WordPress. It offers an incredibly customizable system that can take almost any form you want, and it allows you to implement a lot of small customizations without relying on extensions. However, between WordPress and Joomla there can be only one winner, and the crown must go to WordPress. You just need to select an additional language and start translating the content.
It is also possible to quickly change the languages of the administration area. And you won't have to install other extensions or pay for third-party services. The good news is that Joomla offers strong user management. It comes with advanced access control for page restriction and a user action log, which helps to monitor any actions performed by specific IP addresses on your website.
For content management, Joomla is clearly a winner in the CMS market. Joomla allows many more native content types than its closest competitors, in the form of modules, articles, menus, menu items and more. Yes, Joomla is good for websites. Although its market share is declining compared to WordPress, Joomla can still create a top-notch website.
If you know the way with Joomla, the platform even offers greater flexibility than WordPress. Not only did the Joomla backend (admin panel) continue to work, but the frontend of the site looked and worked exactly the same. If I were asked (and I do) the question of “We would like a stock management system, then I would choose Joomla because of its flexibility and the integration that I can do. However, I will say that I think the Joomla admin is cleaner, but when I buy a WordPress component instead of Joomla, it definitely looks better.
That's saying something, since Joomla is 100% volunteer-run and has no commercial funds, marketing or even development behind it. To effectively extend Joomla on your own, you'll need to have some skill with both front-end and back-end PHP development. I'm willing to bet that a lot of people in the web development space still don't realize how skillful Joomla is now when it comes to SEO. There is no official Joomla template library, so it's hard to get a number of Joomla templates available.
Nowadays, you can find Joomla templates that fit almost any industry, be it popular or incredibly niche. In other words, before you create content in Joomla, you need to create categories for the type of content you want to create. In addition, Joomla offers developers and website administrators the option to purge caches (and expired caches) directly from the admin panel. Yes, by the end of this year Joomla will release the new version v4.0 and then I'll see that happen;).
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