cmsXperts

With many search engine specialists agreeing that using a content management system to build your website can penalize its position in search results, webmasters need to take great care in choosing a CMS that allows for an effective search engine optimization without penalizing the ease of use of the tool.

Main SEO Issues of Content Management Systems

Some of the most often cited issues include:

• Bad META tags: not all CMS allow webmasters to edit the META tags for every single page or blog post being published, and many webmasters tend to simply ignore this, hoping they will get sorted automatically;
• Keyword poor URLs: on some systems, such as WordPress, webmasters can customize the format in which new page URLs are being displayed, for instance including the article title itself (which is generally a good practice). However, not every CMS does, forcing the site to use progressive numbering or other arbitrary fields instead;
• Dynamic URLs: search engine specialists agree that dynamic URLs don’t get indexed by Web spiders as fast as static URLs. For instance, a dynamic URL such as www.sample.com/page.php?id=32 usually tends to be less Google-friendly than www.sample.com/page32.php.
• Peruse of SPAN tags to set links and paragraphs styles, which tends to clutter the page code, making it slower to load and harder to parse for the spiders. More in general, CMS can use text in images, script or AJAX based navigation that can result almost impossible for Web spiders to index correctly and completely.

Best SEO Practices for CMS

When choosing your CMS, the main factors you should be looking at if what you care about the most is search engine optimization are:

• W3C-compliant code: a page that is coded to match W3C (X)HTML standards is a guarantee that it will be parsed by all search engine spiders correctly: while Google needs to be able to parse non-compliant pages as well, the Google homepage itself not respecting the standard, complying to the W3C directions ensures that even the smaller search engines, whose spiders aren’t quite as elaborate as Google’s, will have no particular problem indexing it;
• Text-based navigational links: Flash or other complicated navigational links are, again, hard to understand for the Web spider. When image-based, the CMS should allow you to set the ALT tag, which you should fill with a descriptive text;
• URL customization capabilities: as explained before, it’s important to be able to set static, keyword-rich titles for your pages. Some experts also suggest that the lower your pages reside in your site hierarchy, the more their importance tends to be discounted by search engines: for this reason, it might be a good practice to be able to publish your pages all under the same directory;
• Reducing of code clutter: the CMS should use cascading style sheets as much as possible and avoid peruse of SPAN tags, which will speed up the page load speed considerably. JavaScript code should also be contained into separate files rather than in the page itself, to allow for a better code caching.

Some experts will say that the best SEO practice for CMS is simply making sure you’re not using one. However, it would seem that content management systems are now gradually shifting towards a better and better search engine optimization, also thanks to third-party tools.

For webmasters using WordPress, the recently released “All in One SEO Pack” is certainly a big step forward in this direction, taking care of automatic title and META tags optimization and avoiding some of the duplicate content to be found on WordPress blogs.

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.

If you are going to use WordPress as your Content Management System (CMS) for your Web site, or you just need a fresh new look for your blog, then there’s a few things you might want to check for before choosing your theme.

Your new theme can have an impact on your visitors experience, search engine ranking, link building and marketing.

Here is checklist of 10 important elements you want to look for to make sure your new theme is utilizing all the functions in Wordpress, and is SEO ready.

According to a 50-pages comprehensive report compiled by Rich Shreves at WaterAndStone, the three open source content management systems WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal are by far the most used publication-oriented CMS on the Web, having opened up a large gap on the rest of the pack that only seems to be getting wider with time.

In the introduction, Shreves illustrates the aim and importance of the document:

Debating the relative popularity of the many open source content management systems
provides an endless source of fodder for blogs and discussion forums. People want to know
who the market leaders are, not just as an academic exercise but often in an effort to help
make informed decisions about product selection.

A strong market share also means having the possibility to rely on a strong community-based support, ease in finding professional that have experience personalizing themes and plugins specifically for that platform, as well as an indirect confirmation on the stability and general validity of the tool itself.

CMS weekly downloads. Licensed via CC-BY-NC

The report, which concentrates exclusively on publication-oriented open source CMS and leaving aside other important commerce-oriented solutions such as the popular and GPL-licensed osCommerce, tries to assess the popularity of such tools by considering a large number of independent factors such as an estimation on the number of weekly downloads, live installations, third party support, books in print, and the “brand strength” measured in terms of elusive factors such as inbound links, search engine visibility and Google search volume.

The interpretation of the large amount of data gathered is certainly interesting, as it is at times contradictive. For instance, while data shows that WordPress is by far the most downloaded CMS by a factor of 4x on its nearest competitor (Joomla!), the latter is also the one for which you can find the largest number of user guides and the largest number of personalized custom layout development services, and the one with the highest Google search volume.

Of course, what this tells us is that we need to carefully evaluate the specific characteristics of each CMS and interpret the data rather than just say that “the one with the best numbers wins”: it also tells us that it’s incredibly hard to find a single, definite metric to assess once and for all which content management systems feature the best market shares.

All things considered, WordPress seems to be the most widely used content management system. The factors that seem to have influenced its popularity the most are mainly the flexibility given by its plugin architecture and the subsequent trend of webmasters to make of this platform their tool of choice for their fully-featured websites, rather than just their blogs. Not to mention the enviable stability and the very active development team, which keeps rolling out new versions (for new platforms as well) at an impressive pace.

As you well understand having a website is great, but having a website which has up to date information and newly added content is even better.

There are number of different ways to change and update the content on a website. In this article I will go over the different options so that you will better be able to find the correct solution for your budget.

1. Webmaster
The first way to manage, update, change or create new content for a website is to have a dedicated webmaster working as an internal employee for your organization. This webmaster must have a working knowledge of such technologies as HTML, CSS, FTP, Graphic Design and other basic web development and web design methodologies. The webmaster would serve as the primary vehicle through which updates and modifications would be made to the website, through the utilization of professional web development protocol.

Pro
100% flexibility and stabilizability. With a full time webmaster, you may add, change or create any part of your website at anytime you please and you may change to look feel and function any way you want. You have 100% flexibility to add and change the website with absolutely no restrictions but the skill set and capabilities of your webmaster.

Con
Cost - to hire a full time web professional you must have enough updates and changes to the website to justify the salary of a full or part time employee.

2. Third Party Service Provider
This is a commonly used scenario for many organizations who do not have the need for a full or part time webmaster. In this scenario your organization would contract with a third party service provider - often the same company who built the website in the first place. When your organization needs updates or changes to the website, you would email or call the service provider who would implement those changes to the website. In this scenario there are two major fee structures:

1. Hourly
In the hourly fee structure the service provider performs the updates to the website and bills your organization based on the time it took to implement the changes. This is a good scenario for organizations who have non predictable changes that don’t occur in a regularly scheduled or predictable manner.

2. Contract
The contract fee scenario is best for situations where you organization will have regularly scheduled changes to the website such as monthly or weekly specials, promotions, events or constantly changing job postings. Since the workload is the same for every content change the service provider can quote a monthly contract price to make the changes to the site. This scenario is best for companies who have no full or part time webmaster and who are unwilling or unable to invest in the up front cost of the development of a content management system for their website.

3. Content Management System
Content Management Systems (CMS) are becoming more and more popular these days as organizations realize the benefit of having an up to date, dynamic and alive web presence. CMS allows non-technical employees of your organization to make changes to the website without having to understand professional web development protocols such as HTML, CSS, FTP or graphic design.

Through this option the web development agency who designs the website, builds into the site specific pieces of functionality and usability that allow non-technical content providers to serve as webmasters; updating, changing, modifying and adding content.

There are two major kinds of CMS:
1. Database Driven Control Panels
2. Software Based Contributions

Database CMS Approach
In the Database Model approach, an advanced CMS method, the web developer will build custom data structures to hold and store the web content, which is set up to automatically publish the content to the website. The non-technical content contributor would utilize user friendly forms to input the data which would then be stored in the database and automatically served up on the web page.

For example: For an news page, the web site content contributor would login into the Control Panel and fill out a form with data fields such as “News Item Title” “News Item Date” “News Item Description” etc. Then click “SAVE” that piece of content would then be stored in a database and automatically published onto the website with no further action required by the content contributor.

Pro
Anyone can modify the website, anyone who knows basic computing can login in and modify or change content. Low ongoing cost compared to hiring a 3rd party service provider at hourly or contract rates.

Con
Unnecessary cost for organizations with little or infrequent website changes. Large upfront and/or ongoing cost for advanced CMS for database and advanced server costs. Updateable pieces of the website are hard coded, so all updateable items much be identified at the outset of the development. Slightly more rigid options for updating content versus the Software Method.

Software CMS Approach
In the Software Based CMS method the web development agency builds the website using a specific methodology that will allow the website to work with specialized web design software. The software is comprised of basic word editing and layout tools similar to Microsoft Word, but has the capability of connecting directly to a web page and allowing the user to make changes to the website. This method eliminates the need for content contributors to have advanced web development proficiencies in HTML, CSS, FTP and Graphic Design by enabling them to utilize a simple and basic graphical user interface.

Pro
Anyone who knows how to use Microsoft Word can make modifications to the website. Low ongoing cost compared to hiring a 3rd party service provider at hourly or contract rates. Low upfront and ongoing cost compared to the Database CMS Model. Great flexibility, non-technical content contributor can operate with great freedom to make changes to the website.

Con
Small learning curve necessary for software. Lack of heavy constraints used in Database method gives user the freedom, but can result in non standardized web formatting and jumbled content structures.

In Conclusion
Regardless of which method you use to change and modify the content of your website, the most important thing is that you are keeping the content on your site fresh and alive.

In todays market of sophisticated web users, it is easy to sniff out stale and dusty content on websites that have not been changed in years. The ability of your website to remain alive, active, dynamic and constantly refreshing is a major contributing factor to your organizations ability to remain competitive online.

For more information about Content Management Systems and how they can help improve your web presence please contact us and we will set up a time to further educate you on the benefits and opportunities of CMS.

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.