We eat, sleep and breathe Joomla!

Since its introduction in 2005, Joomla has become the first choice of PHP based web site developers. More and more developers are turning to open source CMS products, and Joomla is their first pick due to several reasons. Some of them are listed below -

1.Joomla is free and its source code is available

Joomla’s most striking feature is that it is completely free for personal and commercial use, it doesn’t have any hidden costs, and it is open source. Many people do not like to use free software unless it is also open source. The reluctance could be due to a hidden fear of malicious coding, viruses or adware. All these factors do not affect Joomla since it’s source code is freely available on its own web site. Anyone with enough knowledge of PHP and MySQL can download the source code and look for themselves. You can even modify the source code to suit your needs if you are ambitious.

2.The Menus are created in real time

In most other CMS packages, menus are hard coded when you develop the web site. It is fine for the first time, but it becomes very difficult to make changes to those menus afterwards. It becomes a nightmare to update hundreds of web pages just to make a slight change in menu system. With Joomla, the scene is different. Its menus are created in real time. This means, you can add the menu items using any standard text editor like notepad or myedit, and paste the changes once into the Joomla editor. Joomla takes care of reflecting those changes in all affected web pages. Same thing is applicable for images and other objects.

3.Templates, Templates and more Templates

No CMS software is complete without support for additional modules. All commercial and most of the free CMS products offer support for external modules. Nothing comes even closer to Joomla in this case. With a dedicated team of several thousand developers worldwide, there are practically thousands and thousands of templates, plug-ins and extensions ready for downloading. Most of them are free of cost. Even those which are commercial cost much less than other commercial packages.

Availability of free extensions is probably second biggest reason for the popularity of Joomla. (The first reason is obvious – it’s free)

4.Control Panel – The best one around

However powerful a CMS product might be, there are times when you need to add, remove or modify its contents. Joomla excels in this area too, since its interface is user friendly, help is always available, and the user forum (With hundreds of users willing to offer you their advice) is great!

5.Joomla has one of the largest user base

Don’t underestimate this. This means there are plenty of user forums, free advice, feedbacks, free code, bug fixes, templates, suggestions available to you at any time. It is almost one of the liveliest communities on the web with something new to offer every time you visit their sites.