

HN: why do people use Joomla? - cmspro

The three main open source CMS systems are Wordpress, Drupal and Joomla. I have quiet a lot of experience with all three. Wordpress is known for its ease-of-use and large number of plugins and high quality templates. Drupal has a higher learning curve but is very stable, highly customizable, and powers some very large websites. ...And then there I Joomla. The admin interface hasn't been updated signaificantly in years. While Wordpress and Drupal continue to innovate an incorporate new features, Joomla's development seems to be stuck at a stand still. There are many plugins available but the quality is not nearly a stable as Wordpress or Drupal plugins. Most importantly, Joomla isn't best in class for any category - features, ease-of-use, etc. Joomla appears to be entirely mediocre in every way. I'd like to hear from the Joomla people out there why they use Joomla. Thanks for the discussion.
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sabj
I am in the "things were different a few years ago" camp. Joomla was a very
fair CMS choice at the time, in particular for more static sites, when
compared with Wordpress. If something didn't merit the learning curve and
other headaches of Drupal (again, especially a few years back) and was more
cumbersome than was possible with WP at the time, Joomla was a fair way to go
about doing it. At the time I did a few projects for myself and others using
it.

Now, though, the templating system and everything else feels rather archaic to
me, and I am much quicker to just turn to Wordpress for almost any "quick out
of the box" projects I would ever need to do -- WP just works and is so
extensible and easy to use, and so easy to skin as I need it. For some
instances I could see wanting something more but nowadays Joomla doesn't have
as much to offer for me or, I think, many others.

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bigiain
I think Joomla was honestly an appropriate choice in its time - a few years
back Wordpress really was "just a blogging tool" and Drupal, while perhaps a
better cms at the time had (at least for our clients) a big downside in that
explaining the whole "taxonomy" system was just too hard.

Things have changed lot in the last few years, Wordpress is an honest-to-god
cms these days, and people (again, I'm thinking specifically of a few clients
of ours) are beginning to understand why learning how to use taxonomies solves
some real world problems. Perhaps Joomla hasn't progressed at the same rate.
We've got a few clients with Joomla sites, but I haven't considered
recommending Joomla for quite some time...

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word
Searching HN for past discussions on Joomla, you see mostly negative
remarks....

[http://www.google.com/search?q=joomla+site%3Anews.ycombinato...](http://www.google.com/search?q=joomla+site%3Anews.ycombinator.com)

Searching HN for past discussions of Drupal or Wordpress, you get a lot of
positive remarks and lively discussions about the pros and cons of each
system... just as you would with most any technology.

But Joomla seems mostly negative yet it is the second most popular open source
CMS in use! Why do people use Joomla?

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theboss_edgar
Well, in a job I was, I was forced to use Joomla and work with the code, to me
it sucks really bad. I guess I were force to use it 'cause the place I was
working they just were able to create stuff in Joomla and in a bad way. My
work was to fix all the stuff that didnt work ok on Joomla, so I had to fix it
in the code.

