Before I can begin with this review, I must give you a little background. Joomla is an open source Content Management System, originally based on Mambo!, which was also an open source CMS.
A couple of years ago there was a partnership formed between the mambo project and a commercial company. For whatever reasons, the entire core development team of mambo voted with their feet and left the project, re-branding as “Joomla”, with basically the same codebase as mambo. Its the open source of equivalent of Prince changing his name to a symbol.
Now at version 1.5, the Joomla team have re-vamped the code base throughly, and with this RC2 release are now looking at a stable and reliable CMS system with a better, cleaner interface than ever before.
If you’ve ever played around with Joomla 1.0, you’d know it was a very good CMS, with a few flaws. Ultimately you would build an array of sections and categories, menus and “mambots” (or plugins to you and me). Next was to write the articles, assign them to the relevant sections/categories and point the menu items to the right places. You would then apply a skin to display it all with pretty colours.
Consisting of two areas: the user interface (front end), and the admin interface (back end), the front end displays the contents of the website to the world at large, the back end allows you to configure and tweak the site, all of it done through a web interface with PHP. The data is all stored in a MySQL database, and the end result validates XTHML 1.0, CSS 2 and RSS and atom feeds, assuming your template will validate.
Its possibilities have always been endless, from forums, to online shops, to simple websites and everything in between.
Having configured 2 sites with joomla 1.0 and one with joomla 1.5 I can confirm that to the end user the new version doesnt seem much different. Admin interfaces appear rather similiar although with a few minor changes. Graphics is much slicker, and the pages in the back end are far more intutitive than before. Skins are better dealt with in Joomla 1.5, as well as much more flexible; Expect to see a lot of free skins available in the near future.
The codebase, as I mentioned before has been overhauled. This has resulted in incompatibility with all previous plugins (mambots). A Legacy mode is available to allow them to work however it is far from perfect, and also a bit beside the point.
It will take time for people to update their plugins to work with 1.5 but it will happen.
My main complaint with Joomla has been the “flickering” that is apparent as the screen updates. This may be a problem with slow or meandering code, or just a problem with how it is designed. Other PHP CMS systems don’t suffer from this problem; I am wary of condemning the software for this reason as it is not as apparent as I may have you believe. It’s never going to look as slick as a flash site, it is true, but it is SEO friendly, which flash just plain isnt, and never will be as far as I can tell.
CMS with flash is possible, but tends to cost a bit more (time or money, depending if you are a developer or a customer), and again, you will suffer from missing out on web clicks - i.e. it won’t benefit from google searches from contributor content in the same way as a joomla site can.
There is one thing joomla will always be able to say:
It is a very good, totally open source CMS system which will always be more flexible than any closed source equivalent. It is for this reason I am using Joomla 1.5 for a company website I am working on.
For its few flaws, it really is a wonderful piece of software.
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