Website Knowledge for non-techies - Part 2 - Taking a look at the Joomla CMS

A content management system (CMS) is a software application or set of related programs that are used to create and manage digital content. So in the example of a website, the CMS is a vital tool for managing the site content - text, images, layout, code, and much more. In the old days, and even now, you could still create a website in nothing but code - but CMS makes life a lot more easy for us. So - which CMS do you pick? For my work, I have chosen to work with 3 - WordPress (being very popular), Joomla (being popular and extra powerful) and then Magento, for specialized work in ecommerce only. Let's continue the write up, based on information soon to be posted on my company website for web development services.

Part 2 - What is Joomla?

Joomla is the next most popular CMS and a fully dedicated professional platform for building 100% responsive websites, apps, or portals with advanced architecture and strong core features. Examples of Joomla users include business, corporate, government, non-profit, schools, institutions, libraries, publishing houses, magazines, portals, e-commerce, and others. Joomla CMS provides highly professional publishing, authoring and article management. Multiple languages, geo localized versions of pages, different themes on different pages or areas of the same website. All 100% responsive. The latest versions of Joomla also bring great ease-of-use improvement for professional content authors and site administrators.

Joomla is an open source project and thus free for all. Joomla is a dedicated professional authoring and content management platform with great features and ease of use.

Joomla - Architecture

Joomla professional CMS is based on an MVC or “Model-View-Controller” web application framework. Utilized by professional software developers it can be used standalone for creating 100% responsive websites and apps. MVC gives great freedom to professional designers to create views which 'override' underlying data or business logic. Data can be 'driven' in very dynamic or interactive ways across 100% responsive apps. Joomla enables professional designers unparalleled freedom to express information.

A big strength of Joomla is how large and highly complex/nested content structures are handled. Together with extensions, APIs and business logic available to fully utilize 3rd party systems. Joomla can collect and present any kind of information in 100% responsive formatting for any screen size.

Joomla Framework is powerful such that developers sometimes need only subsets of components or extensions to produce standalone responsive web apps of high quality and professionalism. An example of which could be building mobile apps to interface with existing internal business systems and logic. Such apps could enable a workforce to complete simple tasks efficiently from their own mobile devices using apps built on Joomla CMS.

Joomla provides a 100% responsive professional CMS platform written in PHP. Joomla uses object-oriented programming (OOP) and known software design patterns. Joomla runs on LAMP/LEMP or other host stacks. Joomla has great built-in features out of the box, before requiring any plugins. Standard core features include Caching, RSS feeds, printable pages, banners, newsflash, event calendars, individual blogs, search, multiple languages and geo-locale sites. A fully professional content management system –without 3rd party plugins, all 100% responsive.

Extensions are what adds to the functionality already available in Joomla's professional CMS platform. They are categorized into 5 main types: Components, Plugins, Templates, Modules, and Languages:

● Components are called to render the main page body and the largest extensions, and are driven by menus.
● Plugins are sometimes also called components, in essence event handlers, performing actions in response to input or data present, and firing within modules or components.
● Templates control the main look and feel of the page or entire site
● Modules can be thought of as ‘boxes’ around and render content within the page itself. Modules take input from components, or plugins perform actions on them.
● Languages are very simple extensions and allow you to support multiple languages and geo-locale versions on your 100% responsive website or mobile app.

Who uses Joomla?

A few examples of more complex organizations that utilize Joomla’s built in powerful functionality:

● Corporate / Enterprise Web sites or portals
● Corporate intranets and extranets
● Online magazines, newspapers, and publications
● Online record stores, book stores, libraries
● Online Encyclopedias
● E-commerce and online reservations
● Large catalogue resellers or wholesalers
● Logistics companies
● Telecommunication Providers
● Government applications
● Small business Web sites
● Non-profit and organizational Web sites
● Community-based portals
● School, Colleges, Universities and church Web sites

The core Joomla framework enables developers to quickly and easily build:

● Inventory control systems
● Data reporting tools
● Application bridges
● Custom product catalogs
● Integrated e-commerce systems
● Combine multiple complex sites into a single view
● Complex business directories
● Reservation systems
● Communication tools

Since Joomla is based on PHP and MySQL, you're building powerful applications on an open platform

Features

The following are just some of the many features included with Joomla out of the box:

• Sophisticated
  In the ways Joomla stores and retrieves information, lay one of its key strengths as a CMS

• Integrated
  With a powerful application framework following an Model-View-Controller architecture and OOP

• Multilingual
  Adding locales and geo based variations of your site in different languages couldn’t be easier

• Multiple Users
  9 levels of user access provide unprecedented control over who can edit, access, publish, create, delete users. Ideal for multiple department organizations

• WYSIWYG
  ‘What you see is what you get’ graphical user interface for generating and editing your content

• Content Manager
  Not only pictures, words, music or video but a full range of MIME compatible data formats

• Banner Manager
  Built in ability to create banner ads or have clients with paid banners, run as many banners on your site as you wish

• One-Click editing
  As admin, just click, and type away to correct typos or omissions and publish them from the front-end, no need to switch over to the admin/author back-end.

• Link Manager
  All your links are beautifully organized, in human readable form and always in categories and highly searchable

• Search
  Smart indexing, advanced search options, auto-suggest all built in for visitors, also ensuring your website is highly index-able by the major search engines

• Contact Manager
  Add contacts and manage all the information for all the actors (users) of your site, (including as a data point in any business logic)

• Menu Manager
  Menus and menu items are unlimited, and organized into nested categories and subcategories and appear according to user access permissions

• Responsive with Bootstrap
  Websites and Apps built with Joomla framework will be able to respond on virtually any device

• Template Management
  Use a single template for the entire site or a separate template for each site section or menu item

• Amazing Fonts
  You are not restricted to standard Web fonts, the ability to use Google fonts is also built into Joomla as standard

• Microdata library implementation
  Technology built in which significantly improves your SEO through automated Author tagging and more

Conclusion

Joomla's powerful and professional authoring tool is not only great for 100% responsive websites and portals. Joomla CMS is highly extensible through its masterful framework and application of known up-to-date computer programming concepts. Joomla platform can be more than CMS. Joomla professional CMS platform can power amazing 100% responsive websites, portals and mobile apps. As a CMS, structure vast amounts of content, run complex e-commerce catalogues, and provide awesome, interactive, 100% responsive views of data. Joomla CMS abstracts complexity of the business logic; so professional designers can focus more on the user experience.

WordPress CMS may have thousands more plugins at it’s disposal, and Joomla CMS may be harder to learn –however, WordPress CMS would require dozens of plugins to meet Joomla CMS out-of-the-box features. With these features baked into an efficient core engine, allows for creating truly powerful and scalable, 100% responsive web applications.

Joomla is the chosen CMS of many schools, institutions, libraries, bookstores, online catalogues, encyclopedia, multi-language multi-country site versions - Joomla is worth looking into deeper if you think your needs may reflect these, especially if you intend to have multi-departments of users internally or externally to your organization.