Likelihood to Recommend For a new site: 1. Are there any hosting requirements? eZ Publish works best on a traditional LAMP stack. 2. What is the expertise of the development and systems administrations individuals? There should be some PHP development experience and a solid level of Apache and MySQL hosting. 3. Who will be managing the content of the site? What is their bandwidth for training? For ongoing content changes?
Read full review It seems with the release of Joomla! 4 that the weak areas have all been covered. Its always been good for the mid-level small to large business, the blogging was WP, and the large-scale enterprise was probably bespoke. But the new interface is so simple it seems pointless using WP when Joomla! is as easy and can then grow as big as you like. The Workflows feature which allows you to set up work pipelines easily is going to be a boom to any larger enterprise sites. Couples with the new API which I got to see at one of their user groups, is amazing. They were creating articles on one site then another site was taking the feed directly for just certain categories. Really blows your mind what you could do with that and the new workflows.
Read full review Pros Content Taxonomy: Content is managed in a tree. Though taxonomy vs folksonomy is a near-religious debate among professionals, clients seeing the system for the first time just seem to "get it" more often. Content Flexibility: Common content types such as blog posts and articles are available out of the box. However, customizing these and creating new content types is very easy. Developer Friendly: Developers need only a little PHP experience to get started. Of course being an expert doesn't hurt and opens the door for the development of custom modules. Read full review We use Joomla to build our websites and web applications because of its incredible intuitiveness and tools to make everything more manageable. Its working environment is quite comfortable for my development team, and its web design resources significantly speed up our work when carrying out web development projects. It allows you to use blocks to create and visually manage websites and divide them into different categories without programming knowledge. Read full review Cons The template language: Outputting content or doing something special with it requires use of the templating language. Myself along with other developers I have trained, found this to be one of the biggest hurdles. Layout of physical files: The system decides what settings files and templates to use based on a hierarchy of modules. The same file can exist in multiple modules and you can find yourself deep within very similar looking folder structures, causing confusion during debugging. Community: eZ has a solid set of community contributors but the gap between it and Drupal or Wordpress is pretty large. Read full review Because Joomla's user community is smaller than WP, it lacks as many choices from 3rd party developers, meaning it can be a little more difficult to find the right extension for what you need to accomplish Along the same vein, most of the best 3rd-party software for Joomla! is paid Simple features such as Add to Menu and Cache cleaners should be adopted as part of the Joomla! core, though they are available as extensions Joomla! could use a simpler and easier URL rewriting process Read full review Likelihood to Renew I gave it a rating of 10 because I just love how Joomla! works, how it is set up and how it handles many users. Also it is very fast, and there is no overload on the MySQL database or servers ever.
Read full review Usability Joomla! 3.x is easily installed either manually or via a script provided by your host. It contains most of the tools needed to begin creating websites right from the start. Those features that it doesn't have are easily installed via links and buttons from the thousands of extensions available in the community
Rita Lewis Freelance Web Designer and Content Strategist
Read full review Performance Today's Modern Joomla performs very well and is robust and durable. The pages load faster than they ever did in the past and Modern Joomla's integration into other software or systems has become seamless. Modern Joomla sites will last long and will stay running forever.
James Fauria Webmaster \ Web Developer for the City of Pomona
Read full review Support Rating Between the core Joomla developers who are excellent at answering questions and providing support, you have a whole community of developers who work with Joomla and are happy to help fellow developers out answering questions and supporting the Joomla project. Out of the many communities I am involved in for open-source software, Joomla's community is by far the best.
Read full review Online Training It is good if you know Joomla! if not it can get a bit confusing
Read full review Implementation Rating Joomla has gone through tremendous growing pains. It is now better than ever. But before, when it was going from 1.5-2.5, the templates and plugins would break over and over again. If you don't understand what Joomla was trying to do back then, you might have a bad attitude toward it. Today, those pains are over and things don't break like they used to during that time period.
James Fauria Webmaster \ Web Developer for the City of Pomona
Read full review Alternatives Considered eZ Publish isn't as large in community size and number of installations as other content management systems. However, it's just as capable and met our needs:
Developers, system administrators, and project manager can all speak the same language during the development and maintenance cycles of a site. End-user training is very straight-forward. Vendor support is available. Client IT departments can access if need (developers/designers/sysadmins). The community is there (forums) and there are solid contributions (extensions) from both the vendor and the community. Read full review We tested other platforms like WordPress , Magento and some local CMS. But Joomla offered us better resources for generating content. Joomla is a CMS suitable for many types of projects, especially if you have several people editing content at the same time. It allows you to maintain visual standardization and offers many options for working with images. With its ability to control access to different articles, categories or even different components, it is a great tool, even if they are managed by different people. Read full review Return on Investment Common knowledge: By making eZ a core offering, developers, system administrators, and project managers were able to communicate with each other effectively. Training: Due to its content taxonomy, end-user training often went well. Support: In our case, we had Gold support from eZ Publish which saved time and helped with customizations. Read full review Joomla has reduced our costs of rolling out a new website because it uses less developer time and can be rolled out by individual users as needed. Joomla has a lot of extensions and add-ons that make it easy to create and implement advanced solutions quickly. Read full review ScreenShots