The Joomla! Epidemic
The web design world has taken a massive leap forward in the past few years, as companies have started shifting the focus from building static websites where customers have to contact the developer every time they want to update the site, to a new type of site driven by what’s called a “content management system”, or CMS for short. This is an excellent step forward for anyone who needs a website, as it allows a user to instantly update their website with the most relevant information, instead of calling the developer and paying them to put it up when they have the time.
As a result of this shift, almost every website development company has jumped on the bandwagon to make sure they are offering their clients CMS systems with their website development, in order to stay competitive. At Reality Hosting, we decided to develop a proprietary CMS system that was designed from the ground up to be extremely powerful, yet user friendly. This is not the only way to go, but in our opinion it’s the optimal way to provide a client with the best possible solution.
That being said, we’ve noticed an alarming trend among developers in the area and all across the web. For some reason, a very large number of companies are embracing an open-source CMS system called Joomla! for the back end of their websites. While I’ll be the first one to step up and support open-source software, there are appropriate and inappropriate applications of any software package. Joomla! has some serious problems that can cause you much heartache down the road, and for this reason is best avoided.
Why is Joomla! so bad?
1. Usability
The administration section of Joomla! is a usability nightmare. It’s extremely counter-intuitive and difficult to use. So, not only does it take a lot of training and practice to get up to speed with updating and changing the content on your site using Joomla!, but if you have a change in staff (I know, this never happens! heh heh), the new staff member will have to go through that steep learning curve all over again. In the long run, this costs your organization lots of lost time, which results in lost money paid in wages.
A CMS system should be intuitive and very easy to operate without sacrificing powerful functionality. A user should be able to sit down and have a basic understanding of the CMS system in 5 - 10 minutes maximum. This is a completely realistic goal with some careful forethought and planning.
2. Search Engine Friendly URLs
As the Internet becomes more prevalent in our society, consumers will increasingly turn to search engines to find companies. More and more users are looking for businesses in their local area ( i.e. “Flower Shop in Brantford Ontario”) on search engines, and making sure your business shows up on page one of those results is very important.
By default, Joomla! has ugly URLs that aren’t very search engine friendly - if you look at the address bar in your browser when on a Joomla! site, you’ll see something like this “index.php?option=com_content&task=section&id=1&Itemid=2″ , when ideally you want a much cleaner URL structure, something that looks like “Home/53/0″. If you can control the keywords that show up in the URL, all the better, as this will help to better optimize your site for top search engine rankings.
3. Extending Joomla! is a nightmare
If you need to add functionality to your website that isn’t included in Joomla! by default, prepare yourself to break every major software engineering rule. This can result in lengthy debug sessions to track down issues with the code that are difficult to find. What does this mean to you as an end user? All the extra hours your developer spends wrestling with Joomla! will end up on the bill you pay at the end of the day, inflating the price you pay.
When using a proprietary system, the company developing your site has built the CMS system from scratch themselves, and therefore they know the software inside and out and can easily extend the functionality to meet your needs.
4. You can’t own Joomla!
The Joomla! CMS system is basically open-source software that’s freely distributed by the GNU GPL - basically, that’s a fancy acronym that means the system is freely distributed and will always be free no matter how much you customize or change it. This is bad for developers, as any work they put into the Joomla! system to develop a site for a client becomes completely open-source and can be distributed or sold by anyone who has purchased a copy of the software.
As a site owner, this can be bad for you as well. If a developer ads some functionality to Joomla! that you have envisioned, they can turn around and release it as a free add-on to Joomla! to allow anyone to download and incorporate that functionality into their website. You can do nothing legally to stop this, due to the nature of the license that Joomla! is released under. Edit Note: This is inaccurate, please see Elin’s comments below for a full explanation.
5. Poorly Coded
Any competent web developer who is familiar with the language Joomla! is written in will tell you that the source code (or the instructions that make up the program) is what’s called “Spaghetti Code“. On a large scale, poorly written code like that which is found in Joomla! can cause a lot of issues… It can slow the operation of your site down, as it won’t run as efficiently as it should, and if you have problems with your current developer and move to a new one who isn’t extremely familiar with the Joomla! system, it will take them much longer to sort through the code.
If a car dealer tried to sell you a car containing a poorly built engine with lousy efficiency by saying “Eh, it runs…doesn’t it?”, you probably wouldn’t be convinced. Joomla!’s “guts” are the equivalent of that poorly built engine.
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March 21st, 2008 at 2:18 am
If you have decided to develop a proprietary CMS because open source sucks, why are you using WordPress?
March 21st, 2008 at 3:04 am
Hi Becky,
As I mentioned at the beginning of my post:
“While I’ll be the first one to step up and support open-source software, there are appropriate and inappropriate applications of any software package.”
This post was born out of frustration after meeting with client after client who have had a website built on Joomla and how useless it has been for them, since they can’t make heads or tails of it. There is good open-source software and bad open-source software. We couldn’t find an open-source CMS that had the user-friendliness and feature set that our clients (small to medium enterprises with low to moderate computer experience) needed. So we built our own.
March 21st, 2008 at 12:49 pm
Good on you for building an application that works for you and your clients!
“As a site owner, this can be bad for you as well. If a developer ads some functionality to Joomla! that you have envisioned, they can turn around and release it as a free add-on to Joomla! to allow anyone to download and incorporate that functionality into their website. You can do nothing legally to stop this, due to the nature of the license that Joomla! is released under.”
This is an incorrect understanding of the GNU GPL. If you pay someone to do custom work, assuming you use a standard contract, you are the owner of that work. If YOU chose to distribute that distribution must be GNU GPL, but it is your choice to distribute or not. If it is important to you that no one else has the same code, you need to make sure that the agreement when you hire the coder is that you are the copyright holder of the work produced, not the coder. This is Standard Operating Procedure in work for hire.
March 21st, 2008 at 1:08 pm
Odd. Why not use your tool for your blog?
You might want to work on your HTML so that it passes standards. Your {Name removed per Client’s Request} site - made with your tool - doesn’t stand up. {Link removed at clients request, it was a link to W3C’s validation tool showing errors and warnings on the site in question}
Two questions on your point about “owning” open source:
1. If someone buys your proprietary CMS - do they “own” it? I own my dog, for example, and am therefore legally entitled to give him to whomever I want. Can I do that with your software if I “own” it?
2. You are wrong about custom code. It is perfectly legal to contract with a developer, purpose custom code from that person with the agreement that it not be further distributed.
March 21st, 2008 at 1:29 pm
Elin, thanks for your comments, good to learn something about the GNU GPL, I appreciate you clarifying that for me. The sentiment came from learning / reading about about the Brian Connolly incident that occurred with Mambo.
Becky,
1. Because our CMS is a CMS, not a blogging application. We don’t run our CMS on our main site, because we’re web developers. We don’t need a CMS to run a site, because we have the tools and the knowledge to edit it.
2. We aren’t big on validation, here’s a post that can explain some of the reasons: http://www.mdgraphics.ca/blog/?p=18
3. Yes, any client who gets a website developed with our CMS, owns a single site license to it and they can transfer it if they wish.
4. The custom code has been addressed above by Elin.
Furthermore, it’s obvious that you are just upset about our opinion, and are solely looking to attack our company. That’s not welcome here. If you’d like to discuss and identify issues and disagreements without hostility, you are welcome to. However, further comments that are solely aimed at attacking our company will be removed.
Thanks,
Dave
April 30th, 2008 at 5:48 pm
Have you considered using Drupal (http://drupal.org/ )? It’s a Joomla competitor, used by Sony, Nasa, Amnesty International and Britney Spears - in our experience with site development, we’ve found it builds a rock-solid CMS overnight. It’s extremely easy to extend and maintain, and the community support is staggering.
They’ve just released Drupal 6, and you can get a taste of the features in the release docs ( http://drupal.org/drupal-6.0 ). Drupal is also under the GPL license, but is lightyears ahead of Joomla.
May 5th, 2008 at 5:09 am
Hi Andrew,
I can’t say that I have looked into Drupal too much, however that may be an alternative for anyone who is looking for a GPL solution. Now that we’ve developed our own proprietary CMS, and our clients really like how it works, we’re sticking with it!
Thanks for the information thought!
November 7th, 2008 at 9:19 am
Hi,
I’m a Joomla user, I must admit certain user unfriendliness in the administration panel but it can all be resolved if you built a pretty admin template. That’s how I get around the problem.
Come on if you have a point to make, make a valid fight about w3c don’t just say that you will remove posts. It’ll prove that you are good programmers. But w3c is still a debate out there.
November 7th, 2008 at 11:59 am
Hi Juser,
Thanks for your comments. Now that you have build a nice admin template for Joomla you can overcome that issue, but shouldn’t Joomla have been built with a user-friendly admin section in the first place?
I’m perfectly willing to debate the value of W3C standards or even the CMS issue. What I’m not interested in doing is listening to a broken record that repeats the same thing over and over, while ignoring the counter-points I’ve made to those issues.
There were several “commentators” saying the exact same thing as Becky was saying and they happened to be on the same IP as well. So that’s where that came from. I will never remove an reasoned and intelligent comment even if it directly contradicts my own philosophy. I’m all for intelligent debate, I just don’t want a playground “No it isn’t!”, “Yes it is!” type of pointless arguement.
December 12th, 2008 at 11:10 am
I find your Joomla points to be a collection of outdated information and half-truths.
1. Perhaps your users are unprepared for a tool like Joomla. It is a powerful tool with a diverse functionality. The users I have worked with, understand it and can easily navigate the back end. If you are looking for something simple, then perhaps an in-house basic tool like yours will work.
2. Joomla 1.5 addresses this completely.
3. Any programmer that knows php knows how to extend Joomla. It is easy to do and thousands of modules to use. I don’t know how to extend a proprietary tool like yours.
4. Handled
5. That is a standard sales pitch against open-source. The truth is that some older versions had problems but 1.5 is well put together, highly function and secure.
Take a good look at 1.5 before you invest to much more time and money into your tool.
December 12th, 2008 at 11:42 am
Hi Wayne,
You are certainly welcome to your opinions, and maybe your experience is different… but for us we meet with people constantly who’ve just developed their site recently (less than two years old) and are redeveloping because they can’t grasp Joomla.
Our target market, is small to medium businesses who’s staff and owners often times have limited computer savvy. For me usability is the largest most important issue.
Our system isn’t “basic”, it does many things that are not possible in Joomla..for example with our system the user can generate top level navigation, and dynamic javascript drop downs on the fly with the click of a button. The difference is the user interface is put together in a simple straightforward way that can be learned with a small time investment.
Regarding extending Joomla, again this is from personal experience. We’ve seen countless cases of significant amounts of money dumped into extending Joomla with terrible results. To clarify, I’m not talking about adding a shopping cart or standard common functionality, rather highly specialized and complex applications specific to a particular business. It’s possible that it may be a case of the programmer is the problem…but that’s another issue solved by going proprietary in the case. If the company in question has the technical ability to build a stable and complex CMS system from the ground up, then they are going to be able to build code to match anything you need.
December 14th, 2008 at 6:29 pm
What is your opinion on Joomla 1.5?
December 14th, 2008 at 8:16 pm
Hi Wayne,
Most of the clients I am referring to in my previous comment were running Joomla 1.5
Thanks,
Dave
January 29th, 2009 at 11:33 am
I have tried to find out more about your cms but what I found confused me. Why are there three or four companies trading on your work? Reality Hosting, RJM, Jamian Media and Easy by Design all share credit for the same work. What’s going on?
January 29th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
Hi Wayne,
It’s not uncommon for a company to have multiple brands. EasyByDesign was an attempted foray into open-source CMS offerings and is basically defunct at this time. The rest of the companies are different web design / hosting brands operated by a parent company www.JMRH.com.
We don’t really advertise our cms, so you won’t find much information about it. We advertise our web design services, and introduce our CMS to potential clients who can then measure our system vs. what’s being offered by the competition.
Thanks for your interest.