Killer CMS - Joomla

I hadn't had much need for a Content Management System (CMS) until, recently, I offered to help a friend get her site up and running. She has written professionally for the Web for years, but the actual web design is handled by the organizations she works for. I was going to whip something up for her myself but with zillions of CMS systems available, I didn't see any reason to start from scratch.

She doesn't have a hosting service yet, so I started looking around at some of them. Many hosting services include CMS support. It seemed like it would be easier to start with one that was pre-installed, so I first looked for services with pre-installed CMS. Several providers supported Joomla!, so I decided to give that a try.

Joomla!'s demo site was down, so I went ahead and installed it on my local machine. It was literally installed in five minutes. My home box is a Windows machine and I already had the Apache/MySql/PHP stack installed using XAMPP. If you haven't tried XAMPP, it is just about the easiest way to get the stack up and running on Windows. All I did was drop the .zip files contents into my xampp\htdocs directory, point my browser at http://localhost/joomla/install, answer a few questions and I was done. So many things like this I get frustrated just getting things set up that I give up before I ever start. Not so with Joomla!.

After the install process completes, you have to remove the install folder in order to continue. This is a security feature. Once it is removed, pointing my browser to http://localhost/joomla produced a page that looked like:



So far, I have found Joomla! to be intuitive and easy to learn. But what really makes it exciting to me is the depth of the community behind it. For example, Googling on "Joomla templates" returns 7.9 MILLION hits. The first template site I went to has 1,500 free templates available! Hundreds of plugins are also available. I guess I am the only one in the world who didn't know about Joomla! until now.

My comments are based on the 1.5 RC3 (codename Takriban) release. The current production version is 1.0.13, which I have not tried.

One thing that frosts me is that it is written in PHP. I consider this a hack language, not worthy of real software efforts. Yet people are getting cool things done with it. Too bad it isn't written in Rails or Django. ;-)