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Joolma from an admin/developer perspective
August 08, 2014

Joolma from an admin/developer perspective

Katherine Hambley | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Joomla!

It is being used right now in a couple departments for their own dept web sites. It solves the problem of the dept heads being able to create pages on their own site and edit those pages with very little support. We just don't have the man hours for me to support third party sites outside our primary CMS.
  • Edit in Context - Joomla allows editing in context right out of the box which Wordpress and other open source CMSs do not
  • Approval Chain processing - It is easy to set up an approval chain workflow in Joomla unlike other CMSs
  • The Admin page - Very well crafted admin page and access
  • More Templates! Wordpress has thousands of "themes" available and you just plug them in, in my experience, it's not that easy with Joomla.
  • There needs to be a Developer API, making it easy for devs to create plug-ins, templates, and access the back-end database.
  • I find that end users don't understand "articles" and other Joolma specific jargon. Stick with the defacto standard like "posts" and "pages"
  • Positive impact on IT personnel, Joomla! saves time by being intuitive for users, which means less support from IT.
  • Joomla! is easy to set up for developers.
  • Joomla! is free and teh basic setup cost is minimal.
  • WordPress,Ektron Web Content Management System,Drupal,Magento,Adobe CQ
All have their pluses and minuses and I didn't choose some of the CMSs, like Ektron. The company I work for already had it and needed it set up and have templates developed. That said, I find Joomla! much more intuitive for developers, but not necessarily more intuitive for end users. I'm not sure that Joomla! would be an appropriate choice for an enterprise level CMS like Ektron. But, at the same time, it is not overly bloated with features like an enterprise level CMS, like Ektron. I really like how you can scale up WordPress and add the features you need so you are not loading features that you'll never use. It really affects performance which is the number one thing my users complain about. Although it is not easy to use an enterprise database like MS SQL Server or Oracle with WordPress and Joomla!, as far as I know, they were not designed to use an enterprise wide database. I wonder how they would perform at an enterprise level.
I believe Joomla! has sectors that it would be a great fit for, like education and small government sectors. It's great for those with less than 100 content authors. For enterprise level, it wouldn't be my first choice.
Will there be multiple content authors / admins? How adept are they with technology? And what device will they primarily be using to access the site, admin and end user? Joomla! works well when there are multiple authors with limited technical knowledge.