I have been a software engineer for nearly 20 years and have even picked up a couple awards along the way. I've been around more than one block, seen software trends come and go, and I'm now jaded and crusty and hard to impress. But the now-famous open source content management system called Joomla definitely impresses me.
Here's why Joomla is dominating in the content management space:
1. It is free.
I am still amazed at this. Joomla is a big product with an enormous feature set. The man-hours it must have taken to create this system is mind boggling, and my hat is off to those who have managed to herd all the cats that put it together.
2. It is open source.
Joomla development is driven and directed by Open Source Matters, Inc., a non-profit organization. Their commitment to open source is almost unparalleled, in my opinion. In fact, if anything, I'd argue they go a little overboard. But their commitment has truly benefitted the user community, so who am I to argue?
I will say that, all things being equal, I will take an open source project over a proprietary one. Who among us has not been held hostage by a vendor at some point? At least with open source, we can make the changes we need ourselves (or hire it done if we're not programmers).
3. It is a mature and stable second generation product
Joomla isn't perfect, but bug fixes and enhancements are frequent and comprehensive. As I alluded to before, the core feature set is huge and the product is quite usable. The latest major revision (1.5.x) included significant improvements in usability, too. The bottom line is that you can make Joomla work--and literally hundreds of thousands of web sites do just that.
4. It has a robust component model and a vibrant third-party component market, both free and commercial.
The sheer number of extensions available for Joomla is breathtaking (well over 4,000, and that is a conservative estimate). This fact alone convinced me that Joomla had reached critical mass. You can get extensions that do event scheduling, ecommerce, document management, classified ad management, blog creation, real estate advertising, Yahoo-style directories... the list goes on and on.
5. Joomla templates, support, and
Whether you're looking for videos for beginners or expert-level information, there are a multitude of third parties supporting Joomla. You will not need to suffer in silence! Amazon.com lists no less than 352 Joomla titles!
Not only that, but Google returns over 9 million web sites when you search for "buy Joomla templates". That's a little crazy, but even page 10 of the search results returned some great template sites. My own web sites look better than ever because I use templates created by professional designers.
Ultimately, I love Joomla because it scratches both of my biggest itches: I love to provide a lot of functionality to my customers, and Joomla certainly delivers on this, both in the core and in the available extensions. I also love to write software: Because Joomla is open source and has a great extension mechanism, I still get to write software--and I can focus on exactly what I want to write. I just don't have to reinvent the wheel or do basic gruntwork.
For me, at least, Joomla is a win-win proposition.
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