Whether it is to create your personal website, for your association or for a business project, you are looking for a simple but powerful solution but you do not know which to choose. How about testing this famous Joomla that everyone is talking about?
You have done some research on Internet and you have discovered many articles offering comparisons between Joomla and other CMS. You have read long threads of discussions on the qualities and criticisms (not always objective and argued) that can be made in Joomla. Most of the time, preconceptions and gratuitous criticism are often the result of ignorance and a manifest lack of openness. But all of this shouldn't stop you from trying and making up your own mind, right?
Joomla is a technically proven solution that turns 15 in 2020. Downloaded over 110 millions time, this CMS has some very powerful native features that other solutions will not offer you, even adding plugins. If you are looking for a powerful and flexible tool for creating your website, Joomla is most likely the one for you. If you still have doubts, here are some answers to the most common criticisms that are unfairly made of Joomla.
5 stereotypes about Joomla
Credits: Joomla
Joomla is hard to learn
Wrong. It is not complicated to learn to use Joomla. But that doesn't mean that it's easy to learn to use Joomla.
The first thing to know is that the learning curve of Joomla is pretty short, if tempted that you are diligent and tenacious.
To create a website with Joomla, you do not need to know computer languages such as HTML, CSS or PHP. On the other hand, if you are already familiar with programming languages, Joomla is not complicated to understand.
With only few days dedicated to your self-training, you will be familiar enough with Joomla to get what you want. Today, the web is full of forums, tutorials and open access documentation if you need help and answers. And with the help of the International Joomla Community! online, I would be very surprised if you were blocked for more than a few hours.
5 stereotypes about Joomla
Joomla is hard to handle
Wrong. As with everything we learn, the level of difficulty will depend on your personal investment. If you practice 1 hour per week or 3 hours per day, the result will not be the same. Your progress either! But rest assured, once you get a bit more familiar with the admin panel and the main features and know what you want to get, it will get easier and easier.
For example, it only took a few hours for one of my clients to understand and take control of the administration panel of her Joomla website while she had any knowledge and practice in the matter at the start of her project.
Joomla is hard to rank
Wrong. First of all, this is the good content which is SEO friendly, not the tool. A CMS, whatever it is, needs content to rank at search engines. To create content for the sole purpose of being referenced by search engines, then you must start by defining your content strategy including doing a cost-benefit analysis of the time and energy you will devote to make your content SEO friendly and the benefits you will gain from the ranking obtained.
Once we have said that, if you have heard any criticism about the problem of getting a Joomla or if you have encountered difficulties on this subject, remember that no search engine penalizes a CMS in particular for SEO. Google only cares about the content, not the CMS.
Apart from the quality of the content you offer and publich on your site, have you :
- setup your URLs correctly?
- efficiently fill in the title and description tags of all your pages?
- submit your site's sitemap.xml file to search engines?
- etc.
It goes without saying that if you have no idea what this means, I encourage you to turn to the support groups in the Joomla Community who will be happy to answer and help you.
5 stereotypes about Joomla
Joomla's updates are hellish
Wrong. If you decide to run a marathon without training and without a warm-up, you may at best get cramps, at worst get into serious trouble. Similarly, if you are trying to migrate and / or update Joomla without taking some basic precautions, you might have some surprises . The criticisms leveled against Joomla on this point have not been relevant for a few years now. Today, the update is done in a few clicks from the administration panel and the migration process is really easy to follow.
Here are some tips to make Joomla updates and migration easier for you :
- backup the website and its database regularly,
- test on a local server your backup which must be functional,
- update all the extensions installed on your website,
- for the extensions that you can no longer update, replace them without hesitation.
Joomla is not flexible
Wrong. If there is one quality that we should recognize in Joomla, it is its flexibility. Natively, this CMS already allows you to do a lot of things: write content, create as many pages as you can imagine in blog format, add a secure contact page, etc.
If you need to add other features, know that there are over 8,000 extensions available to you on the Joomla! Extension Directory that cover all imaginable needs. Suffice to say that flexibility side, Joomla does not really fear anyone..
Credits: Lou Nilema
Useful links
- www.joomla.org : Joomla official website
- docs.joomla.org : Joomla official documentation
- community.joomla.org : the heart of Joomla
- launch.joomla.org : test Joomla online
- extensions.joomla.org : more than 8,000 extensions are waiting for you
- forum.joomla.org : the amazing forum support
- volunteers.joomla.org : if you want to join us, it's here!
- shop.joomla.org : support us and spread the Joomla love
- opensourcematters.org : OSM is the legal structure of Joomla
Conclusion
You have understood, the criticisms leveled against Joomla are not really justified and most often come from people who do not or no longer use this CMS. How else to explain the 110 million downloads and that Joomla won many Open Source Content Management Awards from 2006 and 2019? It goes without saying that in 15 years, Joomla has evolved enormously, and keeps evolve, often by bringing major innovations which today make this CMS, the choice to be favored to create your next website if you like flexibility, power and vibrate within a real community.
Do not hesitate to get started, to test and to create your website with Joomla because when it comes to the Web, curiosity is a very good thing ;)
5 stereotypes about Joomla
