Ask HN: Pro's and con's of Joomla with quantifiable data/information?

2 points by piotr_krzyzek 13 years ago | 3 comments

I'm doing a bit of research about Joomla, partially because a client asked me to though also because I'm having trouble finding qualitative data for or against it. Instead what I mostly find are useless posts simply ranting about how they hate it because of XYZ but never back up their claims; in other words, to me they seem to talk trash about Joomla without any evidence to back it up. The other side of the coin: I see articles saying how great it is, but all they tell me are the feature set in layman's and sales like terms; all I can think of when I read those are: well, there is nothing here that tells me how it is different, better or unique when compared to other platforms on the interwebz (yes, with Z!).<p>One popular article mentions the difficultly of upgrading from Joomla 1.0 to 1.7(?? or some version like that). Though it seems rather silly to assume a completely re-written CORE would be 100% compatible with old stuff. Stuff from Apple OS 8/9 does not and will not work with OS X. It's just too different of a system.<p>That said, my current bias is to just say "I don't see any reason to use Joomla over what we use now," though the technology does interest me. So, can someone please shed some light for me on how or why Joomla may (or may not) be a great system with proper data to backup their claims. Simply saying "it sucks" or "it's great" will not help this conversation since it's just favourtism at that point.<p>Thoughts?

briandear 13 years ago |

It's a pain in the ass to use. The plugins are often not backwards compatible. It's amateur quality. The database is mySQL which is not ACID compliant, among other problems. Joomla also is terrible for SEO as the URL handling is badly implemented.. (the whole thing runs off of Index.php? for example.)

Joomla is for people that don't know anything about web development and want something they can throw together. If your client "must" use something like Joomla, you'd be better off with WordPress -- there are far more plugins, the documentation is better and it's not a pain in the ass to deploy. Or better yet, just build a Rails CMS. It isn't that hard.

Joomla also has a bad reputation for security. While it can be secure, it often isn't because of the way 'developers' build the sites.

Joomla is based on Mambo (from the PHP 4 days) and is badly engineered. It isn't even object oriented. It's also not MVC, so you can't separate business logic from presentation, among other things. It's just a mess.

The documentation is terrible compared to WordPress -- a pretty big deal if you want to create custom extensions.

I'll go out on a limb here and add that the types of clients that love Joomla are the types of clients I can do without. I did some Joomla work for a client and it was the worst experience I've ever had working with anyone, because the types of people that value Joomla, rarely value craftsmanship, good design (both front-end and back-end) and are generally ignorant (or hardheaded) about good software practices. Never again.

Oh, and it's in PHP.

mattquinn 13 years ago |

Definitely avoid Joomla if you can. I've been maintaining a Joomla site since 2009, and I can't update any of the core components because it would break too many plugins for which there are no newer, compatible versions.

I'm building a replacement for that site right now using Rails. If that's not an option, go with Wordpress.

tsurantino 13 years ago |

Joomla is so slow.

It looks like nothing about it has significantly changed over the last four years.

I'd recommend Wordpress (very simple) or even Drupal (which is complicated, but more CMS-like as Joomla is).