Recently, we found ourselves in a familiar situation where we needed to have a consumer-facing website up and running in no time. We got together with the client to evaluate the options and after talking about several options, somebody asked "and what about Joomla!?"

There were a lot of opinions, pros and cons thrown around the table, but the general feeling was positive so we decided to do a quick evaluation. As you probably guessed, the end result is that we decided to go with Joomla!, primarily because of its extensibility and huge ecosystem of developers.

Joomla! is a free Open Source (OSS) Content Management System (CMS) currently at version 1.5.9. It is a "Website in a box" you can download from the project site, install it on your favorite server and then customize the heck out of it to fit your needs.

Website-In-A-Box

Joomla! has the most common features already built-in for you such as RSS feeds, SEF URLs, printable version pages, site search and internationalization among many others.

Like other CMS platforms, it has an administration backend where multiple users can edit/configure the site with little or no effort at different levels of authorization. I particularly liked the UI and the navigation of this backend. After all is said and done, however, the area where Joomla! wins hands down is in its extensibility.

There are tons of free and commercial extensions for it. All the ones I tried worked well with the platform. In every case, I just downloaded the extension/module, installed it and the new functionality would come right up. With fair knowledge of PHP programming, you can even build your own. 

For this particular client, I was able to get them the website they wanted by with a combination of custom templates, integrating existing extensions, developing a couple and modifying the rest. I would not call myself a Joomla! "guru", but at this point I know the platform well enough to answer the perennial question:

Is Joomla the Best Solution?

It all boils down to "features" and "customization" issues. In other words, what level of customization does the client need?

Despite the many advantages, there are few risks and difficulties I found while working with Joomla!:

• The HTML it generates is not the cleanest and leanest it could be (but I believe that they're working on that). This may be an issue if you follow W3C standards (and you should or else @mollydotcom will get you).
• The variety of HTML generated by components and modules makes Joomla! difficult to syle with CSS. You need to have experience with HTML and CSS to achieve exactly the look you want, consistently through the site.
• We tried not to, but in the end I had to dig in with PHP and make some modifications to components and/or modules to generate different markup.
• Independent packages are maintained by folks not related to the Joomla! core team and they can conflict with each other. Troubleshooting this kind of problems can be time consuming.

In summary, I can say that if the client requires a very specific web application or a highly customized site, you will save time. But, it won't all work straight out of the box. Depending on the specific requirements, the issues listed above may sap some of the savings.

Would I Make the Same Choice?

After all is said and done, however, I am still convinced we made the right choice for the level of complexity required by this site. We got the site up and going with less programming and higher quality.  More importantly, we got it in production (i.e., generating revenue for our client) sooner than if we had tried to do it from scratch. Obviously, we didn't do a side-by-side test, but I also have the feeling that although the learning curve might have been a bit longer, the results were delivered faster than we could have with some of the other options. I'd like to try some of the others and see how they compare.

We took full advantage of the features already present in the package, tested every day by lots of websites worldwide. Reproducing this code base would be, at least, a real pain to develop from scratch.

The OSS community has invested a lot of time and effort in this CMS. They've done a terrific job, given the size and complexity of the task. There are some TODOs and they'll always will. That's the nature of software. It needs to evolve.

To the Joomla! core team and all the contributors out there, we only have two things to tell you:

Congratulations and Thank You!

Oh, and thanks to whomever asked, “and what about Joomla!?”