cmsXperts

For those who want to start a professionally looking site without any prior technical knowledge whatsoever, EllisLab’s Expression Engine is certainly a viable option. This CMS is in fact both powerful and extremely easy to use, maybe even more than some of its open source alternatives, and a comprehensive user guide, along with the professional technical support, will provide an answer to all of your questions on how to manage your site with this flexible tool.

Expression Engine Overview

In order to test this proprietary software, you can go to the EE website and either download and install the free “core version” on your own server or try the 30-days full trial, which includes installation on their servers and full customer support, for a price of just $10.

The first thing that Mac users will notice while using the admin interface are the subtle similarities between Mac OS X — particularly the Safari Web browser — and the design of the Expression Engine interface. Whether this has been made on purpose or not is not clear, but the result is certainly a very clean design that looks easy on the eyes and doesn’t overwhelm the user with a myriad of colorful (and sometimes distracting) pictures, focusing on productivity and functionality. As you can see in the screenshot, the admin interface features a simple but effective top navigational bar that allows you to quickly access the main sections.

A click on the “Publish” tab brings you to the usual wysiwyg editor from which you can write new content for your website. In addition to the most common features found in other content management systems, Expression Engine also enables you to do such things as postponing and programming the publication date of new content — very useful if you are going on vacation but still want to keep your site updated daily — and the ability to manage pings and trackbacks of your post, similarly to what you can do with other open source tools such as WordPress.

The “Communicate” tab is also something not commonly seen on other content management systems, although certainly useful. It allows you to send emails to all the members (admins, authors, editors) of the site, using the email each user provided at registration: you can even choose to send a message to a specific user group in a sort of “newsletter” fashion.

Finally, the last two sections, “My Account” and “Admin”, enable you to personalize both your personal user settings and the global site configuration.

Personalization: Skins and Plugins

The “Templates” tab allows you to preview and switch between previously uploaded themes, as well as edit their files and preview their changes on the fly, as long as the necessary file permissions have been set correctly on your Web server. Here too there are features unique to this CMS: for instance, you can easily create a new template on the fly, both from scratch and by duplicating a previous one. You can also export your themes to your desktop with a single mouse click.

As for downloadable site themes, you can find many free ones from the EE template library, which features themes, gallery and RSS feed templates as well as more specialized additions such as search and control panel themes. All the source code for these improvements is freely available, which means you can easily create your own template and personalize it by copying the code and modifying it as needed.

The “Modules” section is a repository of expansion and extension packs, which you can also activate with a single click. Such modules range from statistics, RSS feeds and comment management to advanced features such as a blogger API and blacklist/whitelist capabilities.

Flexibility is beign publicized as one of the prominent features of Expression Engine, and this CMS certainly lives up to the expectations thanks to its powerful add-on architecture which puts virtually no limit to what this tool can be used for. Some of the plugins include a discussion forum, image gallery, e-commerce site tools, mailing lists and even a wiki.

If you want to get a better idea of what the EE addons can do for you, you can visit the dedicated section of the Expression Engine website, the so-called “Add-On Library”. At the time of writing the available addons are 142: not many when compared to other open source projects, but it has to be said that each and every addon featured in this section includes a complete set of features instead of some isolated ones, which is what often happens with open source plugins and expansions.

Pros and Cons of Expression Engine

While having to pay a fee in order to use a content management system is not something all webmasters would do lightheartedly, the features of Expression Engine make it a great tool, even unique in many aspects. The license for a single website is currently priced at $99 for personal use (sites engaging in personal, non-commercial activities) and $249 for a commercial license.

Included in the price are free updates for a year, after which if you want to keep receiving updates you will have to pay a yearly fee of $19.95 (personal license) or $39.95 (commercial license). You can also upgrade from personal to commercial at any time by paying the difference between the two.

Although the fees are certainly not prohibitive, they do make this CMS worth buying only if you are to build a professional, potentially mid to high traffic website. For this reason, we strongly suggest you either download and install the core version on your server or, even better, make use of the $10 testing fee to try out the platform for a month and see for yourself if Expression Engine could be the right tool for your needs.

Quick and reliable customer support is another point of pride for Expression Engine, which compensates the lack of a vast user community which is typical of open source CMS.

A final note on the future: version 2.0 of the software, initially scheduled for summer 2008, has been slightly posticipated due to technical difficulties. Major changes are going to be reflected in this new version, as a testimony of the great work that is being done behing the scenes. Above, a preview of one of the themes the next admin interface will ship with.

Yet another great tool for the webmaster, Drupal is what is commonly referred to as a “Content Management Framework”, an application programming interface (API) that can in turn be used to build customized content management systems.

Drupal is an extremely flexible cross-platform software that can easily adapt to a number of different applications, offering webmasters solutions that range from blogs to complex e-commerce sites.

The History of Drupal

Unlike countless others open source projects, the history of Drupal is somewhat simple and hasn’t been marked by any major drama such as disputes and legal controversies, although the story is certainly still worth being told.

The software first saw the light in 1998 from the hands of the Belgian programmer Dries Buytaert, and was initially thought as a simple bulletin forum framework which was being used by him and his friends on a local area network to share notes and ideas with his college mates.

The day following his graduation, the group of friends decided to host the site on the Internet to stay in touch. According to Dries, the reason behind the choice of the domain name “drop.org” was a simple typo: the namethat was initially chosen was in fact “dorp”, the Dutch word for “village”, which seemed like a fitting name for their little community of students.

In 2001, after seeing a lot of interest from people suggesting improvements for this tool, Dries decided to release the software with an open source license and decided to name it “Drupal”, after the Dutch word for “drop”.

With time, the framework gradually expanded to progressively add new features in a completely modular way, a philosophy that has been praised by many webmasters and is arguably the very reason for the significant surge in popularity that this tool has encoutered during the last year, with an user base of 350,000+ and consistently growing.

Drupal Features

Drupal sample theme

While this CMS is certainly powerful and feature-rich, the learning curve for the administrative area can be steep, and for this reason this product is certainly not the most user-friendly among content management systems. A full use of the system features takes some getting used to, after which the unique features of this platform really start to emerge.

Because of the great modularity of the platform, the basic features become hard to review, as the “core” version merely consists of a very simple tool to let you edit contents and layouts of your website, even in a somewhat “spartan” way.

Much of the power of this tools comes in fact from its incredibly vast selection of modules and extensions, including themes and layouts to fully customize your website. In a way, one could say that the only feature of the Drupal platform is the possibility to customize it.

Drupal Customization: Themes and Plugins

The “core” version, which is the official release of this software, contains a few default themes from which you can choose to first test and experiment different layouts on your site. However, if you want to stand out from the crowd, choosing a customized theme should be a must for you.

You can find many free themes specifically developed for Drupal on their official site. The first thing that you’ll notice is that, unlike with many other platforms, Drupal themes greatly differ from one another, which is a further testimony to the power and flexibility offered by this tool.

Several thousands modules are also available from the official site and range from tool to aid ad placement and file management to a fully featured e-commerce framework complete with shopping carts and password encryption. These modules are developed by third parts (mostly users), and when using them it is always advisable to keep an eye on security issues that might arise from bugs in their code and make your site more vulnerable to malicious users’ attacks.

In order to help the process of using the right tools for your site, a feature called “Project types” is also available for download. Project types define the type of site you want to install to a higher level, and can therefore guide you in choosing the right themes and plugins that you will most likely be needing.

Finally, official translations in a total of 45 languages are also available and complete the exhaustive set of tool at your disposal to make your site really stand out from the crowd.

Pros and Cons of Drupal

The biggest obstacle to the webmaster is the first approach to this software: in all honesty, when installing a CMS this renowed, one would think that the user interface will be user-friendly and easy to use, but unfortunately that is not always the case. Drupal developers have however acknowledged this and an improved user experiences is said to be the focus of the releases to come.

Atlantis Drupal theme

Once the obstacle has been overcome, the full power of this tool immediately becomes clear and largely compensates for the initial difficulties: with many other CMS, certain aspects in the layout, site structure or internal linking in a website can reveal exactly which tool the webmaster has used: this is certainly not the case with Drupal, in which the very high level of customization makes something like that nearly impossible.

In the latest years, a reported “boom” in the number of Drupal downloads and installations has served as a further testimony of the validity of this tool: downloads alone have reportedly doubled in 2008, and the uptrend certainly looks far from being over.

The developer community is also experiencing an unprecedented growth which is noticeably benefitting users and the quality of the software, and especially security aspects: a great exception in the world of open source CMS, Drupal is in fact considered a tool of particularly high security standards, with issues of this nature that are quickly taken care of by a developing community of about 2,000 and constantly growing.

All in all, while Drupal may not be your first choice if what you’re looking for is mostly an user-friendly admin interface, this tool is certainly worth trying out. Once you’ve successfully moved your first steps there, you’ll quickly learn to appreciate and productively use this tool for your website.

Used and loved by an ever-growing number of bloggers and website publishers all around the world, WordPress is a highly customizable PHP/MySql content management system which is particularly geared towards blogs, but is often used as a general website CMS as well because of its unique features.

A Bit of History

The WordPress project started in 2003 as a “fork”, or independent version, of b2/cafelog, a blog publishing system which had already reached a good following among webmasters, having being used on an estimated 2,000 sites.

In those years, the main competing product was the MovableType package, which is still widely used nowadays. However, the release of MovableType 3.0 in 2004 saw a contested change in their licensing terms, which placed a number of new restrictions, imposing fees for uses that were previously permitted free of charge.

This was a major factor in the surge in popularity of the completely free and open sourced WordPress, which quickly grabbed a considerable share of the CMS market. Having realized this, WordPress developers chose to widen the gap between the two even more by offering free blog hosting on their site, a marketing strategy that had proven very successful in the past.

In more recent times (2007), MovableType seemed to admit its own mistake and reverted to using the standard GNU Public License 2 (GPL2), thus licensing their product as open source and following the footsteps of their competitor, the now much more popular WordPress.

WordPress Features

When approaching WordPress, the first noticeable aspect is the easy-friendliness of this tool. Once logged in as the administrator, the dashboard will provide you with a general overview of your site: actions such as writing a new post or managing comments and categories are just one click away thanks to a convenient top navigational sidebar. From the dashboard you can also have a look at the most recent data such as latest comments, incoming links, WordPress news and hot plugins.

When writing a new post, you can choose whether to use the built-in wysiwyg editor or to edit HTML directly in case you want to add specific character codes, JavaScript or even PHP, although the need to use the HTML mode is beign reduced by the availability of free plugins that facilitate the process of automatically placing AdSense or any other kind of code into your posts.

An additional tab in the navigational sidebar gives you a quick access to the design zone, where you can preview and switch to new themes, again, just with a single click. If permissions are set correctly on your FTP account, you can even edit and preview your theme directly from this section, which allows you to speed up the design process considerably.

The ease of use of this software does not however mean limited features: on the contrary, WordPress is an excellent publishing tool with a complex set of features to manage different posting and editing privileges, making it easy to coordinate the work of webmasters, editors and article writers at the same time with no particular effort. Thanks to a feature introduced in the 2.6 version, you can even compare different saved versions of a blog post and revert any previous changes.

Much of the flexibility and feature richness of WordPress comes however from its plugin architecture, which allows even those with little to none programming skills to extend the platform appearance and functionality.

WordPress Customization: Themes and Plugins

Like in countless others high-quality open source products, the surge in popularity of the WP package encouraged web developers to write custom themes and plugins for this platform to share with the rest of the community, therefore increasing its functionality and layout possibilities. Themes and plugins are hosted on WordPress.org, sorted by popularity and user rating, and are particularly easy to install — all you need to do is download a theme and place it under the “/wp-content/themes/” directory.

An increasing demand for new designs, however, also brought some professionals to sell their own quality layouts instead of sharing them with the community. Unfortunately, because of the open source nature that surrounds the entire project, such developers have to face the risk of seeing their layouts modified and then reproduced without permission, and have to rely on their clients complying with their own proprietary license terms.

A common solution that web developers used to solve this problem, looking for a way to earn money from their own work while still contributing to the community, were the so-called “sponsored themes”, themes which were freely reproducible, but in which developers would place their own ads in order to profit from them. On 10 July 2007, it was announced that such themes, considered by some to be pure spam, wouldn’t be hosted any longer on the WordPress site.

The powerful API used to develop such extensions certainly makes the task easier by providing a good layer of abstraction to the programmer, who can rely on a documentation Wiki explaining nuts and bolts of every single function you can use to build themes and plugins. Additional documentation and forums are also available and, whether you want to extend the platform or just use it for your website, the community in particular is certainly a good place where to start.

iPhone and iPod Touch Versions and Future Developments

With the launch of the Apple “App Store”, WordPress confirmed its busy and aggressive release schedule by shipping a fully-featured version of the tool which runs on iPhone and iPod Touch, opening up new possibilities for webmasters who can now update their site without having to sit in front of a computer.

Looking at the past and present of WordPress, the future certainly looks bright: as publicized in their homepage, the eBay, Ford and New York Times websites among others use WordPress to publish new material on their sites.

Apart from the continuous launch of new features, new versions will obviously also be devoted to bug fixes. Some security experts have criticized WordPress for the number of unresolved security-related bugs, which are inherently hard to fix on an open-source and widely used platform like WordPress is. The aggressive release schedule partially compensates for this by offering frequent updates and fixes which contribute to a vibrant developing community.

While many webmaster might feel reluctant on having to pay to use a top-notch CMS — especially seen the quality level many open source tools in this area are achieving these days —, if your aim is to build a highly professional website and feel like investing in a solid content management system as well as unique design, Interspire Website Publisher is most definitely an option to consider.

Interspire’s Website Publisher Features

In order to fully test the CMS features, you can apply for a demo by filling a form with your personal information and indicating your interest in this software. Once approved, a 48 hours account will be automatically created and you will be able to login and test the full suite.

The admin dashboard at the first login is somewhat different from what you might be used to if you’ve only worked with open source tools: instead of a one-click interface that allows quick access to the various core sections of the administrative interface, Interspire Website Publisher’s main admin page is more of a tutorial with the aim of guiding you to a full setup of your new site.

At first, you are prompted to choose a new theme for your website. Included in the package are 50 custom, general purpose themes which you can easily preview and set as default with a single mouse click.

The second step involves of course creating content for your site. For this, you can make use of the powerful wysiwyg interface that allows you to add text, media as well as set categories and other options such as meta keywords and description all from a single page, like users of open source CMS are used to.

Finally, you are prompted to add categories to better organize the content of your site. Each category features its own description and you can also set other categories to be their “Parent category” for an even clearer taxonomy.

Once you are done with the initial setup, a series of ten “Quick Links” will appear, allowing you to manage your site in the way most webmasters are used to — that is, using a one-click interface that allows you to quickly perform the action you want, be it adding new content, manage comments or modify the general settings.

A very interesting feature which unluckily is not common in other content management systems is the flexibility with which Website Publisher allows you to manage user groups: it’s very easy to create a new user group and set their permission with absolute precision, controlling exactly what any given user is allowed to do or even access once logged into the system.

Personalization: Skins and Plugins

While the fifty themes included in the package may seem like a lot, they certainly can’t be compared to the wealth of hundreds, maybe even thousands of custom layouts available for other, open source CMS.

However, the skins featured in Website Publisher are all generic and eye-catching, and you may find the one you’re looking for without much trouble.

The template section of Interspire.com also features a wealth of completely free material such as website and newsletter templates, as well as free, easily adaptable logo designs (which is a somewhat rare resource).

All the material hosted in this section of the site has been very well designed, and the fact that it is freely available not just for customers, but for any visitor to download certainly puts Interspire under a good light.

In case you have a specific layout in mind, or if you want a theme that better reflects your website topic, you will need to either create it yourself or pay someone to do it for you. The templates are not particularly difficult to make, in fact you can download one for free and tailor it to your needs in a matter of a few minutes, given of course that you have the necessary experience.

We couldn’t find anything resembling plugins or extensions for this specific platform. In fact, the licensing for this product makes it hard to contribute to the software by adding your own features, but we also never felt the need for any such thing as all the common functions are there for you to use, and the level of customization you can achieve by playing with the various settings is indeed quite high.

Interspire Website Publisher Pros and Cons

Many webmasters will scoff at the one-site license price of $289, however it can’t be denied that some of the features of this tool, including the ability to manage user permissions with absolute precision, are simply inexistent on many other platforms, making it irreplaceable for a certain client target.

For this reason, Interspire’s Website Publisher is an excellent tool for medium to large size website with big loads of traffic and a large staff to manage, but may not be your preferred choice if you have reason to think the traffic you will generate won’t be worth the one-time fee as well as the additional design costs you might have to face in order to set everything up.

There is also an entire set of features that those used to open source tools might take for granted, but which are simply not there due to the product licensing. First and foremost, a closed source license inevitably means a limited amount of free themes and templates, having to rely on Interspire to provide the technical support you might need, and the lack of a volunteer community of programmers that continuously expand the product functionality with new plugins and extensions.

Of course, you will have to carefully evaluate these as well as many other factors in order to decide if purchasing Interspire Website Publisher will be a worthwile investment for your website. Either way, we strongly suggest you to try out the 2-days demo and get a first-hand impression as to what the capabilities of this tool are, and whether your specific needs make it worth purchasing.

The overall feeling we got while testing Website Publisher is however of a very solid, stable piece of software that is capable of handling and adapting to your specific website needs. The user interface is particularly user-friendly with its tips and tutorials, and we are overall very satisfied with the product quality. Webmasters with large sites might consider switching to this product and see for themselves the validity of this piece of software.

Mambo, also known as MOS (Mambo Open Source) is a popular and easy to use GPL licensed content management system that also includes advanced features such as caching and advanced templating techniques.

The History of Mambo

Initially conceived as a commercial, close-sourced project at the time of its inception in March 2000, the project managers soon decided to change their minds: in a bold marketing move, they opted for the release of two parallel versions, an open sourced one which was being distributed for free and was meant to get the software known to the wider public, and a commercial version with more advanced features that could be bought for a small one-time fee.

Although certainly innovative and with a potentially sustainable business model, this strategy was ultimately destined to fail in the years to come: following a sudden change in their license terms which now forbid previously allowed uses and modifications in their open source version, the Mambo Foundation had to face legal consequences which soon lead to the resignment of the entire team of the software core programmers.

As a result, the Joomla! open source project was born in September 2005 as a fork of Mambo, with most of the former Mambo community relocated to work on this project. The Mambo Open Source (MOS) project did however continue after initial difficulties and remains, both historically and because of its high quality and innovation it brought to the market, one of the most widely used content management systems in use today.

Mambo admin panel

Mambo Features

When reviewing Mambo’s features, it becomes hard not to compare it to its “younger brother”, Joomla!. In fact, due to the reasons explained earlier, the two packages started from the very same codebase and later evolved along very similar lines. This becomes easily noticeable the very moment you first login into the Mambo admin panel.

The main admin dashboard, in fact, is organized in a fashion that is very similar to that of Joomla!, and the look and feel of the platform sometimes makes it nearly impossible to discriminate between the two.

Once logged in, you will be able to access the core functions of Mambo with a single click, both with a button view and a convenient dropdown menu. Some of such functions include management of “Content items”, “Static content”, “Frontpage”, “Sections/Categories”, “Media” and so on.

A nice Mambo feature from the point of view of ease of use is the fact that the most part of these sections can be managed via exactly the same mechanism, also present in Joomla!: you can in fact manage posts as well as pages, sections and categories by simply clicking on an up/down arrow associated with the item and modify the order in which they are beign displayed.

Alternatively, you can directly assign a number to each item and choose to have them displayed in that order. Although this is not as intuitive as a classic drag and drop, it doesn’t take long to understand this simple mechanism.

Main Mambo managing interface

Similarly to Joomla!, Mambo also includes an interactive FTP client which allows you to preview, navigate and upload to your server images or any other media with a single mouse click. The mechanism is very easy to grasp and is certainly another point of strength that contributes to making the user experience even better.

User and language management interface complete the panorama of the essential features of this software. Needless to say, the fact that Mambo is an open source project means that it can benefit from quality contributions from all around the world, and translations are no exception here, with a vast repository to choose from.

Mambo Extension: Templates and Plugins

While the default customized themes that come with the platform are somewhat “neutral” and could be said to lack personality, a quick Google search will present you with literally thousands of both freely downloadable and professional, paid templates that will allow you to give your site the look and feel you are looking for.

You will be able to preview your new theme from the template management interface simply by hovering you mouse on its name, which comes in extremely handy especially if you are already getting some traffic on the site — you don’t want to surprise your visitors with badly formatted pages or poor layout.

Extensions in Mambo may not be as commonly used as they are in Joomla!, although it has to be said that even the most demanding webmaster will hardly miss any of them because of the flexibility and feature richness of the platform: RSS feeds, automated web indexing for static pages, news flashes, blogs, forums, polls, calendars, internal searches and many other features are in fact already included in the core version and are fairly easy to set up.

A Final Word on Mambo and its Future

Because of its excellent ease of use, great wealth of features and customization possibilities, both in terms of layout and functionality, Mambo is certainly a great CMS for the novice webmaster. The fact it doesn’t make compromises in terms of power and flexibility makes it however a great tool for the experienced webmaster as well.

Joomla! users will find Mambo very easy to grasp, and possibly even somewhat faster and stable, although apart from this, the two otherwise look very similar and a switch from one to another would be mainly motivated by a specific need for a certain theme/extension that can be used on one platform but has yet to be developed on the other.

The future development of Mambo (version 5.0) will, according to the project managers, undertake a complete refactoring and will be based on the open source CakePHP framework. For those with a technical background, CakePHP is an interesting example of Web application framework written in PHP which is heavily influenced by the “Ruby on Rails” concepts.

We can only speculate as to what changes this new adoption will yield, but given the great power and versatility of CakePHP, it would seem relatively safe to assume that the Mambo platform will increase even more in terms of speed and stability. A refactoring from the ground up, like the project leaders have announced, also means that Mambo will have a great opportunity to differentiate itself from Joomla!, stopping the common assumption (and misconception) of many webmasters and users in the open source community that the two are no more than “twin brothers”.

A valuable open source product, Joomla! is a powerful and customizable PHP/MySql general-purpose content management system that is easy to install and can be used to build a wide array of websites.

A Historical Perspective

Born as a fork of the already popular Mambo project in 2005, the earliest version of this package initially maintained much of its ancestor’s characteristics without any significant changes. The reason for the birth of the Joomla! package were mainly of legal nature – Miro International, who owned the trademark to Mambo, founded a non-profit organization with the stated purpose of protecting Miro against lawsuits and resolving the disputes that arose from their sometimes unclear and contradictory license terms, which were partially in contrast with the terms of the GNU documentation license initially used for the project.

As a result, the popular site “Open Source Matters” was created. Following a community discussion on the site which took place several years later, again on the contradictory license terms adopted by Miro, in August 2005 it was decided to give birth to a completely open sourced fork of Mambo, Joomla!, which was named after the Swahili word for “all together” or “as a whole”, consolidating an ‘exotic’ naming tradition that originated from the birth of the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution.

With time and countless user contributions, new features were progressively added to the platform to reach a 1.5 stable version that has much more to offer to webmasters than the original, partially proprietary software from which this excellent CMS originated in the first place.

Joomla! Overview

In order to test the platform “on the fly” and without the need for an installation on your FTP account, users can create a free account on http://demo.joomla.org/ and immediately get a feel for what it is like to use this CMS.

Once logged in successfully, the administrator panel will enable you to add new content to the site, managing your articles as well as your site layout and extensions with just a few clicks; on the right side of the page, a series of messages (“modules” in the Joomla! terminology) allow you to monitor your site with live stats such as most popular content or recently added articles.

As it should be expected from an user-friendly CMS like Joomla!, the article writing interface is complete with a WYSIWYG editor to make the process of writing new content even easier, without the need to edit the HTML code directly. From the same page you can select both sections and categories associated to the article, but also more advanced options that appear on the right side module, such as the possibility to add a PDF and print icon, article ratings, summary and so on, and then of course the buttons to add new images and other media to your posts.

The “Article Manager” section gives you an overview on your content – drafts as well as already published material – also enabling you to change the order in which the posts are being displayed, with the changes immediately reflected on the live site layout.

Analogous “Front Page”, “Section”, “Category”, “User” and “Media” managing interfaces serve a similar role and add even more to the control you can have over your site. The “Media Manager” is particularly interesting in that it simulates an FTP client with live thumbnails of all the icons and images used on the site: uploading a new icon set is therefore made even easier, and becomes just a matter of seconds.

Last but not least, the “Global Configuration” tab lets you set title and meta tags – as well as any other global parameter, such as local time and database settings – directly from a convenient Web interface.

Joomla! Customization: Themes and Plugins

Like it had to be expected, a large number of Joomla! themes and plugins is being created and shared by the user community. On Joomla.org it is in fact easy to download extensions and modules that add even more functionality and flexibility to this software. The official site does not however host themes and alternative layouts, for which users have to rely on third party websites such as joomla24.com.

Here like with other website publishing platforms, the widespread use of this content management system among webmasters allowed the birth of a market of Web design professionals which sell their own high-quality Joomla! layouts and icon themes rather than enabling their free use by the community: however, the circumstances of “open source sentiment” under which the Joomla! project was born have led to a huge number of quality, freely usable layouts to benefit the webmaster community.

Plugins are, on the other hand, rarely being sold by third parties, and on the Joomla official site you can literally download and install thousands of such extensions, which range from flash galleries, shopping carts, complete FTP managers to forums and ad plugins.

Extensions are grouped into six different categories for easy access:

1. Component: mini-application to render the main page body;
2. Module: renders small html blocks on any page;
3. Plugin: changes code behavior dynamically;
4. Language: provides language translation;
5. Tool: external application that helps with creating or managing Joomla! site;
6. Special: extension specific plugin that requires another extension to operate.

Joomla! Pros and Cons

Although an undoubtedly high-quality product, Joomla! has encountered some criticism since its very first stages.

One of the issues that is often being cited and which unfortunately seems to serve as the lowest common denominator for all open source CMS are the security issues, which are typically not solved as quickly as with other publishing tools (say, WordPress [[link to WP review article]]) because of a relatively slow development and release cycle.

Other common issues which are being regularly brought up by publishers are the absence of a granular user access control, which makes it relatively difficult to manage a large staff with different privilege settings – say, editors, publishers and webmasters – at the same time, and the impossibility to fully customize the URL of an article, which would be useful for SEO purposes.

These aspects aside, Joomla! certainly remains an excellent, fully-featured content management system with unique features and a user friendly, easily customizable interface that can meet the needs of a broad range of webmasters and content publishers around the globe, offered completely free of charge, and with a very large community of users that can help you solve any problems you might encounter along the way.