Jammin' with Joomla!
October 18, 2019

Jammin' with Joomla!

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Joomla!

Joomla is used across our organization. It solves our website address needs and much more due to its flexibility and ease of use. We needed a web presence, mailing list, and shopping cart system. Joomla! solved all of these business needs.

We love the additional plugins/components that can be integrated into Joomla! that solves our business needs without relying on hosted services that may hold your services hostage due to their policies. With Joomla, you have the freedom to do what you need and that's what we love.
  • Joomla! now does automatic updates very easily by just clicking one button. Vulnerabilities are patched quickly with automatic notifications.
  • There are so many additional plugins, many of which are free or for a nominal cost, that extend your business capabilities. These plugins are mostly a perpetual license model so they continue to work after their support date has expired so it gives you the freedom of choice to either continue to use it without any strings attached by hosted services.
  • The framework that is available to Joomla! such as the Gantry framework makes it easy to rapidly deploy and structure Joomla to our liking.
  • Joomla is doing a great job so far. They should continue to improve their guidelines in which they have the developers conform to their policies and motivate the developers to make use of automatic updates of their extensions. In turn, it's easy for the end-users to keep their extensions up to date in order to reduce any vulnerabilities with outdated extensions.
  • Any system requires some level of a learning curve. Like many people, in regard to complexity, I feel that Joomla! is in the middle ground compared to other CMS. If there's a way for Joomla! to make it really simple to adopt, then I think it will be a big win for them.
  • If Joomla! can capture the market where it's a matter of drag and drop or a friendly WYSIWYG, then it's a huge win for them. While drag and drop environment is extremely useful for a novice or someone who just needs a basic website, we love the extensibility that Joomla! provides so having both would be immensely valuable.
  • The shopping extension that we used in Joomla! was a nominal cost but we have generated revenue many times over that of the shopping cart system.
  • The mailing system extension that we used in Joomla! was a one time purchase with a perpetual license and it has provided a valuable method to stay in contact with our customers.
  • The form extension in Joomla! was a one time purchase with a perpetual license and we have used that one form system across all of our websites. Talk about ROI, this form extension has been invaluable compared to other systems that are hosted and where they may charge you per domain or per form. With Joomla! and the many extensions, you get your ROI worth.
We chose Joomla! over Drupal or WordPress because it's in the middle ground between those two systems. We needed something that can be extended down the road if we need it, but at the same time, it can't be too complex. We felt Drupal is too complex and WordPress seems to be more reserved for blogging or more simple sites. We needed more than WordPress so Joomla! is a natural fit.
Joomla is not suited if you want a drag and drop environment. If you need to custom control and integrate other solutions, then Joomla is a perfect system. For example, if you need a shopping cart system on your website, Joomla has many offerings to choose from. If you need a mass mailing subscription system, Joomla has many too choose from. There are so many extensions available in Joomla, the challenge is to find the one that fits your needs. What we love about these extensions is that it gives you the freedom to choose and not locked into or abide by the policies on hosted system. For example, many hosted shopping cart system have strict policies in what you can actually sell on your website. They can cancel your entire shopping cart system if you inadvertently violate their policy. With Joomla, you have the freedom and won't be held hostage by arbitrary policies from hosted systems because you are the one hosting yourself, not others.

Joomla Feature Ratings

WYSIWYG editor
2
Code quality / cleanliness
6
Admin section
8
Page templates
9
Library of website themes
9
Mobile optimization / responsive design
9
Publishing workflow
8
Form generator
8
Content taxonomy
9
SEO support
8
Bulk management
8
Availability / breadth of extensions
10
Community / comment management
9
API
8
Internationalization / multi-language
9
Role-based user permissions
9