Joomla vs Drupal vs WordPress – Part One “Joomla!”

Joomla is a free, open-source development platform, powering approximately 2.7% of the entire web.  This platform is simple and easy to use, with no knowledge of HTML required. Just download, add your content and upload to your server via FTP.

You can adapt the front-end aesthetics simply by changing colours and adding a logo. However, beyond that, Joomla has a complex structure which may require the assistance of experienced web developers – Even then, some web developers may need additional training to understand the layout templates.

Alongside the basic features provided by Joomla, they have an animated large community who develop additional plugins for any additional features for your website. There are many free versions available online, however, for something more complex, you may need to pay a small fee.

Joomla can assist you in building a wide variety of websites, such as, Corporate websites & portals, intranets and extranets, online publications, E-commerce websites and Community driven websites. Joomla is great for creating community driven websites, where membership areas, newsrooms, forums and comments come as standard features on the platform.

The security features available for your site, are impressive, the design of the platform means that you no longer need to make all folders and files writable.

One of the obvious strengths is in the complexity of the platform, with deep level navigation & structure, and the use of categories. However, this complexity does not bode well from a Search Engines point of view.

In the past, Joomla has has a table based structure which was caused problems with Google. That said, in the later version of Joomla, the structure is based on DIV code. DIV does allow for the same design as a table based structure, but is more easily scanned by Google bots.