Why Joomla?
Written by Rob | 09.05.09
In 2004 when Lisa and I began building websites together, I was dabbling in php and mysql while Lisa was sticking to Photoshop and CSS. We were building a website to be a front to a Shoutcast stream dedicated to unsigned and experimental artists.
We wanted it to have all kinds of functionality allowing for user management, user uploads, and news RSS. Basically it was going to be a multimedia masterpiece that tested us to our limits and provide the springboard into a career in web development.
We were doing well, we got to become KVR's unofficial radio, and got hundreds if not thousands of tunes submitted. But as we built the site one thing became perfectly clear. We could make things work but we could never guarantee that it was secure. I was always waiting for a mysql injection hack and that would be basically it. We weren't pros and we couldn't afford a security expert so there was always going to be a limit to our success.
Then a systems analyst friend recommended we check out Mambo, and it seemed to have everything we had ever thought of and more already built in. And where it didn't or a third party hadn't already built it, we could. So we get our security, we get all the benefits of a CMS and we still get to use the skills we had been building.
It wasn't just just a CMS, it was a methodology, a wrapper for our own work - a framework.
There were other systems vying for attention at the same time but the crux for me was how quickly we were able to rebuild our old site identically so that nobody could possible tell the difference had we not added extra functionality. To this day one of our specialities has been to convert legacy websites for clients who wish the sites remain as close to the original as possible.
Nowadays Joomla is described in wikipedia as "a free open source content management system for publishing content on the World Wide Web and intranets as well as a Model–view–controller (MVC) Web Application Development framework."
The level of sophistication of Joomla1.5 still astonishes me and J1.6 offers so much more.
I found this link while surfing...
Top 5 Drawbacks of Joomla!
I especially like #5 "For Pete’s sake - you don’t even get to pirate it!"