Compare CMS - Part 3-2 - Popular CMS Reviews 2

Joomla limitations
1. Because it is so amazingly capable in terms of the total number of tasks it can handle, it is sometimes used, mistakenly, outside of its CMS class or type. There are better choices for: multi-team use; large Intranet use; public / private profile use; large page numbers capability; complex content management arrangements; document and file management; and plenty of other usage types. This applies to all CMS everywhere of course: they need to be chosen for their core feature set, applied to the specified task. There is a danger that Joomla will be used for completely inappropriate tasks, as a fit-all solution. In CMS, there is no such thing.

2. Joomla is not an enterprise-level CMS, and it is a mistake to treat it as such. ACL, workflows, audit trails, versioning and so on may or may not be able to be plugged in - but some of these functions need to be in the core to work properly. They are not present in Joomla, and ACL especially needs to be a strong core function in order to work well. Joomla is an excellent general purpose CMS, and the best rich media CMS there is - but a large enterprise CMS it is not.

3. There is a page number limitation that means Joomla is not appropriate for use as a very large CMS. This has nothing to do with traffic,and it will handle high traffic if the hosting is capable. Over 1,000 pages Joomla is not easy to manage, and 10k pages is the practical limit. The content management apparatus is not designed for this size. Most CMS in practice have between 50 and 500 pages so this is not normally an issue.

4. There is a practical limit on the maximum word number per page of six thousand words, or sometimes up to ten thousand, depending on the editor used. Of course, 6,000 words per page as an upper limit - and certainly 10k - is not one that will affect most people. However, we frequently hit it on this site, since it is a very rich resource in that respect. The page crashes, and then we have to split it and rebuild it. That's why the pages keep moving! This won't affect many users though.

5. A CMS is a complex application. In some cases, the user interface has been made exceptionally slick, as here; but that doesn't change the fact that something like Joomla will be difficult for newcomers to use, and then later on, difficult for them to solve problems on. The danger is that people think it will be easy, and overreach themselves. There are a very large number of simply awful Joomla sites out there, which is probably only a statistical certainty anyway. There is a temptation for less-capable users to blame the application, but a bad workman often blames his tools. In most cases a more experienced user or a different application for the task would have solved the problem.

Joomla on a Windows server
Joomla will run on an IIS server but it's not a great solution. In practical terms it will be running at reduced capability, due to the management issues. The server will of course need PHP and MySQL on it, so that would at least exclude the incompetent hosts who don't have a clue how to run a Windows server - they do not offer those options as they don't know how to install them.

If you don't have access to the IIS server management console, life will be difficult; and if there were no user control panel, such as Plesk, it will be worse. The IIS option (or simply a basic Windows server using XAMPP) is fine for LAN work, though if you are talking about an office worktool you might find issues (as ACL isn't really good enough for multi-group use). This CM system will work well for a single group, but not multiple groups.

As regards production a Windows server is not an optimal choice. Even basic things like SEF URLs are going to be a problem, though now there is a simple IIS solution, using the sh404SEF plugin. If you want to run a simple site, then you may be OK. To be honest an ASP CMS may be a better choice - see our page on ASP CMS and flat-file CMS.

It's hard to work out why you would need or want to run Joomla on an IIS server; it's possible if you absolutely have to, but some functions may be unavailable. We would look at an ASP CMS like Umbraco or DotNetNuke first, to see if that would fulfill the brief, before worrying about how to get Joomla working well on IIS. Changing to a normal server would seem to be a better choice.

The new Joomla 1.5 Series

At October '08 the newer series of Joomla, the 1.5 series (the older line is the 1.0 series) is nearly a year old. What's it like?

It's Joomla but better. There are improvements everywhere, many of which could / should have been applied to the older version perhaps. It's different, and will take several hours adjusting to - certainly more than a day in total, when changing to it from J1.0, if you want to count the hours.

In most ways the new version seems to be an improvement. There are some questions to be asked though, such as, "It's not that different - why couldn't some of these improvements have been applied to J1.0?". And, "Why create a totally new version without fixing the old code layout scheme that is obsolete by years, and screaming to be fixed??" Hmm, tough to answer those...

Anyhow, despite the fact that J1.5 is an obvious improvement, we won't be using it any time soon. Why? It's still far too new (a webapp needs to be 2 years old before the bugs are worked out); it still has exploits (even large, well-run sites are still being hacked); it has too few templates as yet; it has too few plugins as yet (and plugins are the reason Joomla works); and the documentation is even worse than the usual open-source token affair.

As usual, no one has heard of that nasty swear word "usability". This word is hated and despised by all developers, who have a heart attack whenever they hear it and run away quickly. No developer would ever consider having usability testing carried out on their applications, as this is the work of the devil and cannot be tolerated.

An example: the first job any user will need to do is remove the ridiculous message on the index page, "Welcome to the front page". But where is it? Certainly nowhere that anyone familiar with Joomla will be able to find! In fact - you won't be able to find it, as there is no obvious help anywhere. You will have to hunt through the forums for hours until you find a well-hidden thread that explains it. Terrific. But if you had just one person on the documentation team who had vaguely heard of usability, tasks like this that need to be done in the first 5 minutes would be flagged up.

And the author / date / time tag that is added to the head of articles automatically? Again, you won't be able to find where that is enabled, in order to switch it off. It isn't in Global Configuration for instance, as it is in J1.0. Of course most people will need to switch it off immediately, as 99% of  CMS websites aren't run as a blog (strangely enough). Why it would be set as the default, when 1% of sites or less need it, is a mystery. But there are always going to be plenty of those when no usability testing is run.

Joomla 1.5 advantages
However the new 1.5 series (currently at 1.7) does have one massive new positive feature - it can live on badly set up servers run by incompetent hosts. As that applies to probably more than 50% of the servers out there, it's a big advantage over J1.0 - and this group also includes resellers of course (reseller hosts), who are a  growing percentage of hosts. Their server set-ups are often unalterable and fixed, and this applies even when the set-up is faulty (they have no access to the server of course).

The problem is that hosts are mostly set up and organised to run flat sites - they have never heard of CMS or ecommerce. But the server needs to be set up differently - correctly - in order for many of these database-driven apps to run safely, or even at all. But many hosts really don't have a clue; they never read any of the security updates from Apache and PHP, for example. If you don't understand what I'm saying here - we've seen hosts running PHP3 on their servers recently. If you have any knowledge of this area at all then that will tell you all you need to know.

So Joomla 1.0 is a problem here as it demands that servers are set up correctly. That means many users have a bunch of problems with their hosts: either educating them, or living with badly-configured servers.

The 1.5 series, though, gets around this in a number of very clever ways. It can override faulty server security settings, and even get around wrongly set file permissions that prevent a CMS running at all as you can't write to the files. It has a built in FTP system (an 'FTP Layer') that just overwrites the blocked files by FTP - very clever.

In addition it has a template override facility, whereby a template author can (and most definitely should) override the faulty code layout scheme that Joomla still has by reason if its history - the mixed tables and divs system - and use the correct div and CSS layout that all modern web pages use. This is a great advantage and should be utilised to the max. SEO for CMS is imporatant and this facility contributes in a big way.

And it may well be even more secure than J1.0 is, in the end - once all the exploits have been found of course...

Joomal 1.5 Verdict
Joomla 1.5 is a big improvement but didn't go far enough, the code layout scheme needed fixing before anything else - by a long margin. Right now it isn't usable for us, but it's getting better every day. Essentially it's still in beta as far as we are concerned, but will soon, hopefully, be a sensible proposition. It needs plugins, templates, and holes patching. Then we'll have to get stuck in and write some user documentation.

Joomla v Drupal etc

For Joomla v other CMS, see the reviews for those individual cms.

Joomla is the best choice for many brochure site CMS requirements. Drupal should be used if there are likely to be user groups with different roles.

Better for SEO :  Joomla or Drupal
This is answered more fully in the Drupal review, but the answer is Joomla. In theory it is clearly the other way round - but that's theory. In practice, Joomla is easier to set up for a better SEO rating. It's true that if you have a great deal of time, and are a Drupal expert, then it may be possible to set up Drupal better. Drupal's big advantage is the correct, tableless layout; but setting up to take full advantage of this requires some time input. In addition, Drupal is much harder to use, so getting even basic SEO functionality is not a 5-minute job. Use Joomla if it's a straight choice.

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