All posts tagged joomla

Joomla is perhaps one of the best known names in the world of Content Management Systems and can with a little effort be adapted to create a good looking e-commerce web store. Not ideally suited for for inexperienced users when compared to some of the other shopping cart software that is currently available.

A free open source content management system for publishing content on the World Wide Web the latest system includes features such as page caching to improve performance, RSS feeds, printable versions of pages, news flashes, blogs, polls, website searching, and language internationalization. Joomla is licensed under the GPL and is written in the PHP programming language and uses the MySQL database.

Originally a fork of Mambo, Joomla has surpassed it’s predecessor in popularity and size by a massive margin, it has a very large support community, a large number of available addon modules and a wide choice themes available from either premium sources or free.

First released in January of 2008, version 1.5 has since seen a number of point releases to cover security holes and issues but it is still considered by some developers as bloated and cumbersome and quite emanding on the hosting server which impacts on page load times etc.

Store setup

Adapting the look is simple if you are happy with changing some colors and the logo. Beyond that, you will find that Joomla has a complicated structure and even seasoned web developers have to go through a learning curve before they master the layout system, and that approach is different depending on the layout template you chose.

Baring in mind that Joomla is structured to create sites for a community or a network with a membership area, newsroom, forums, blogs etc. so there is some work involved and additional module installation required to create an e-commerce store set up.

Usability

Joomla has a nice Administration Area with option dropdowns that can take a while to get used to, it does a good job of making everything available. There are lots of options and it will take a while to get used to manoeuvering within the Administration area, but once you do get used to it, you will find it functions quite nicely.