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HN: why do people use Joomla?

6 points by cmspro ↗ HN
The three main open source CMS systems are Wordpress, Drupal and Joomla. I have quiet a lot of experience with all three. Wordpress is known for its ease-of-use and large number of plugins and high quality templates. Drupal has a higher learning curve but is very stable, highly customizable, and powers some very large websites. ...And then there I Joomla. The admin interface hasn't been updated signaificantly in years. While Wordpress and Drupal continue to innovate an incorporate new features, Joomla's development seems to be stuck at a stand still. There are many plugins available but the quality is not nearly a stable as Wordpress or Drupal plugins. Most importantly, Joomla isn't best in class for any category - features, ease-of-use, etc. Joomla appears to be entirely mediocre in every way. I'd like to hear from the Joomla people out there why they use Joomla. Thanks for the discussion.

4 comments

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theboss_edgar
Well, in a job I was, I was forced to use Joomla and work with the code, to me it sucks really bad. I guess I were force to use it 'cause the place I was working they just were able to create stuff in Joomla and in a bad way. My work was to fix all the stuff that didnt work ok on Joomla, so I had to fix it in the code.
word
Searching HN for past discussions on Joomla, you see mostly negative remarks....

http://www.google.com/search?q=joomla+site%3Anews.ycombinato...

Searching HN for past discussions of Drupal or Wordpress, you get a lot of positive remarks and lively discussions about the pros and cons of each system... just as you would with most any technology.

But Joomla seems mostly negative yet it is the second most popular open source CMS in use! Why do people use Joomla?

bigiain
I think Joomla was honestly an appropriate choice in its time - a few years back Wordpress really was "just a blogging tool" and Drupal, while perhaps a better cms at the time had (at least for our clients) a big downside in that explaining the whole "taxonomy" system was just too hard.

Things have changed lot in the last few years, Wordpress is an honest-to-god cms these days, and people (again, I'm thinking specifically of a few clients of ours) are beginning to understand why learning how to use taxonomies solves some real world problems. Perhaps Joomla hasn't progressed at the same rate. We've got a few clients with Joomla sites, but I haven't considered recommending Joomla for quite some time...

sabj
I am in the "things were different a few years ago" camp. Joomla was a very fair CMS choice at the time, in particular for more static sites, when compared with Wordpress. If something didn't merit the learning curve and other headaches of Drupal (again, especially a few years back) and was more cumbersome than was possible with WP at the time, Joomla was a fair way to go about doing it. At the time I did a few projects for myself and others using it.

Now, though, the templating system and everything else feels rather archaic to me, and I am much quicker to just turn to Wordpress for almost any "quick out of the box" projects I would ever need to do -- WP just works and is so extensible and easy to use, and so easy to skin as I need it. For some instances I could see wanting something more but nowadays Joomla doesn't have as much to offer for me or, I think, many others.