This is part of a series designed to help businesses discover the best content management system (CMS) for their website’s needs and goals. We will break down broad CMS concepts as well as review specific CMS platforms over the course of this blog series.

When my marketing manager asked me to give my insights on Joomla for the next post in this blog series, I knew it would be the most difficult yet to stay objective and unbiased. As I mentioned in my first post of the series, Open-Source or Proprietary, webmasters and developers hold strong opinions about their chosen CMS, and even stronger opinions about the ones they hate. Joomla is that hated CMS for me —though I will do my best to provide an honest assessment of the platform so you can make the decision for yourself.

Joomla certainly has its uses, so it’s worth reading on to hear both the pros and cons of this particular CMS. While it’s not for me, your business’ goals might be perfectly met by Joomla.

The history and usage of Joomla

Joomla, like many open-source content management systems, was birthed from a different piece of software; in this case Mambo. Mambo got its start back in 2000 as a proprietary CMS created by a company in Melbourne called Miro Construct Pty Ltd. As the company grew, Mambo was developed as one of the early pioneers for templating techniques and task automation before Miro made the smart move to create Mambo Open Source 4.0 in 2002. An early player in the open-source CMS landscape which helped the platform thrive at the start.

On September 22, 2005, Joomla 1.0 was released and at the time had almost an identical code base to Mambo. Now as we approach 10 years (happy birthday Joomla!) and seven versions later, Joomla has become one of the most commonly used CMS platforms on the Internet.

According to builtwith.com, as of September 1, 2015, Joomla is the chosen CMS for approximately 9% of the websites tracked by Built With on the entire Internet.

With that in mind, we see a slightly surprising fact when looking at only the top 10,000 sites by traffic—only .7% use Joomla as their chosen CMS.

So why the discrepancy? Why is it that high traffic, often larger and more complex sites, don’t use Joomla? Grab your magnifying glass and pipe as I open the investigation.

Why has Joomla been so successful?

Even though I was pretty harsh on Joomla in the opening, I’ll admit that it still has a place in the digital landscape. The big reason is that Joomla doesn’t do anything too poorly. It’s relatively easy to manage and has a decent amount of extensions. Joomla also still has a strong developer community, even though it has been shrinking with the loss of market share over the last few years.

Pros of Joomla

• Joomla is easy to use – Joomla’s “out of the box” dashboard is definitely very user friendly. The interface is fluid and intuitive. It allows webmasters to manage large amounts of content without extensive training. While it is an intuitive system it still isn’t as simple to learn as WordPress or some of the other open-source competitors. But, Joomla is still an easy option to learn for those new to managing website content.
• Varied extensions – Unlike plug-ins for WordPress, Joomla has multiple classes of extensions. They are broken into plugins, templates, modules, components and languages. Each has its place in the Joomla world and together can make a robust set of tools to implement on your website. That being said, some users find it very hard to find extensions that perform the functionalities they are looking for. They find it even harder to manage successful updates to the site. For advanced users the class system can really help organize site creation but for beginners it can be a setback.
• Simple organization of large amounts of content – The one big area I think Joomla does well is organizing large amounts of simple content. When you are working with sites that house forums, memberships, blogs, whitepapers and other forms of simple content Joomla can be a great platform. If you are creating a site that doesn’t need a lot of special functionalities but is simply hosting a forum or downloadable whitepapers you might be the small niche I would actually consider recommending Joomla to.

Cons of Joomla

• Custom design options are poor – Before everyone jumps down my throat about this one pretty Joomla site they saw this one time, I say this with the average user in mind: Changing the look and feel of a Joomla site can feel next to impossible compared with the ease of WordPress, Drupal, Concrete5, Ruby on Rails and many other platforms.
• Advanced customization – Here we come into why a lot of larger sites with complex functionalities aren’t built with Joomla. Even with developer support, creating and maintaining site functionality through updates is far harder than most of its CMS brethren. You’ll likely have to keep your developer on speed dial to walk you through the mix of plugins, templates, modules and components cobbled together to make your site function the way you wanted.
• Poor marketing options – Joomla is not very search engine friendly. Search engine optimization (SEO) has been an issue for Joomla since it’s inception. You don’t have simple and effective options for creating streamlined SEO management in Joomla like you would find in WordPress or Concrete5.

Concluding thoughts on choosing Joomla for your website

As the title alludes to, Joomla isn’t a terrible CMS. It does just about everything decently, but there is no one area where Joomla really shines. Drupal has developer customizability, WordPress has ease of use, Ruby on Rails has the fastest build times to prototype, Concrete5 has more marketing options than you can shake a stick at and Magento blows it out of the water in eCommerce options. Joomla is the white bread of the CMS world. Nobody will shame you for eating it but why not choose something with more zest?