Thoughts on Joomla CMS?

[Celebrationbird]

Hey!

Anyone here has a site built with Joomla CMS. Always been doing WP but made a mini site recently with joomla and curious if someone has done anything more advanced and if they wanna show it off.

Thanks

[dfiocch]

I started with Joomla 1.5
Now it's not Joomla anymore... I call it Doomla!
I completely reworked it in the years, now is a custom CMS.

BTW, Joomla is a very good CMS. It worths.

[AceHigh Pino]

I used Joomla for some of my earliest portals and loved it. Although I don't know how much they've evolved or have seen an uptick in usage over the years with WordPress seemingly taking over the internet, lol.

[Mattbar]

Once you go Joomla you never go back in my opinion, as the others say, over time you can effectively custom code it to fit your site as it evolves.

[baldidiot]

I'm a big fan of joomla, use it all the time particularly for larger projects.

We've got a couple of very complicated ones in the works at the moment that can give you an idea of the kind of thing it can do, but they're still on our dev server so you'll have to wait for those... Tbh though they're heavily custom coded with some snazzy bits added, so probably not a fair example.

In the mean time, here's a simpler one that I'm literally working on as I type: http://www.bettingsites.org.uk/ - this is using joomla as is out of the box, no additional plug ins and shows a bit of what it can do as standard.

Example of a more complicated page: http://www.bettingsites.org.uk/sports/football/ - here the system has generated it from a series of bits.

• The list of bookies comes through the banner system which allows us to schedule changes to the second (ie: for a temporary bonus change or over the grand national). We can also mass remove bookies and change the order.
• Same with the offers - those we can schedule to expire or move once they're no longer live.
• Articles descriptions and images are pulled in automatically from the article system, auto updates as new ones are added to the category.
• Sidebar shows list of articles from within the category - these update automatically based on what page you're on. Eg: so on any football article page you're shown other football articles.

[Chipy]

Joomla is great, but you should switch to wordpress.

Wordpress has a much bigger community and a lot of possibilities to it.. so if you're in the point of choosing a CMS, go with wordpress.

Good luck.

[Storebuilder]

I've built my sites in Joomla and I think you can do some very cool stuff with this CMS.

[wiitigoo]

One of the worst tools I have ever worked with. When a prospect tells us they have Joomla running, we also start running...the other way!

[hitcasinobonus]

Tried it a few times, but very hard to get it to scale once you have a lot of content. Complete nightmare in terms of structure of the backend. But as been mentioned already, I'm sure it could work if it's highly customized etc.

[vmguide]

I wouldn't recommend Joomla since I think it lacks structure. So if you are used to WP it would probably scare you off pretty fast. If you are searching for open source alternatives to WordPress I would recommend Drupal. The learning curve is pretty steep though, but there are plenty of tutorials out there.

[casinodonkies.com]

I prefer Wordpress as it has bigger community as others already mentioned it before me. A lot of plugins and themes available for WP and new ones come out day by day.

[Poker-Australian]

There are so many CMS now that do the job well, Wordpress has some new competition from the likes of Squarespace, Wix, Shopify etc. Have used JOOMLA before and its decent. However my go to is still WordPress

[AussiePunter]

Personally I could never get my head around it completely, things just don't seem to go where I think they should, but that's my personal preference and because I didn't spend enough time with it. WordPress suits my needs much better, and I had no problem at all figuring out how to customize it really quickly.

I hear that Joomla does occasionally suffer from sever vulnerabilities, as does WordPress and any other CMS of course. At least it isn't as bad as Drupal, I'm scared for anyone who still uses that.

[Strider1973]

I'd recommend to stick to one CMS (for me it's Wordpress).

Once you have multiple websites, it becomes a headache if you have different CMS to maintain. It's much easier to have one CMS, because you'll have to learn stuff only once (e.g. edit text, change to footer, configure a cache plugin, setup backups, how to manage ads etc) and then you can copy-paste solutions (like plugins) from one website to the other one.

I had sites with other CMS in the past (that I purchased), but I wouldn't do that again. It's just a "nightmare" long-term.

[DanHorvat]

Maybe this thread was remotely relevant in 2016 when it was started, but even then Joomla was in decline. It's a niche CMS now.

Not sure which niche would that be though.

Wordpress is the only way to go, I'm a coder and could never make Joomla do exactly what I want. With Wordpress I can. Plus, if you're selling your website, no one will buy it if it's not in Wordpress or pure HTML/PHP.

[baldidiot]

Maybe this thread was remotely relevant in 2016 when it was started, but even then Joomla was in decline. It's a niche CMS now.

Exactly this. Lots of developers started to move away from it in 2017 and it definitely lost the VHS/betamax battle last year.

It's a shame as I have been a big advocate of joomla over the years and in it's day I think it had a lot more going for it than wordpress. That's no longer the case though.

[gramervoop]

I prefer WordPress to hire an experienced developer.

[Royal JokerBet]

I physically hate it. I've worked with Joomla for a year and it made me believe that this CMS is pure evil xD I recommend Wordpress))

[Oksana Vysochanska]

I have no such experience, but I have several good websites built with Joomla CMS:

[tropictraffic]

Yeah, I’ve worked with Joomla a few times — mostly for small business and nonprofit sites. It’s definitely not as “plug-and-play” as WordPress, but once you get used to the interface, it’s actually pretty flexible.

For something advanced, Joomla really shines when you need custom content types or more control over user permissions. I built a membership-based site with custom user groups and restricted content, and Joomla handled that out of the box way better than WP would have without a ton of plugins.

The only caveat is that the extension ecosystem is smaller compared to WordPress, so sometimes you have to dig deeper or do a bit of custom coding to get exactly what you want. But for clean, stable sites — especially if you don’t need to be constantly updating content like with a blog — it’s solid.

What kind of mini site did you build? Curious to hear how you found the experience coming from WordPress.