Joomla
TMA Guild has been working with and developing Internet web solutions with Joomla for over 9 years starting with the predecessor Mambo. We like to specify Joomla to our clients for the following reasons.
- Easier to roll out. Joomla has a lot of features "Out of the box" and is generally ready to go after installation. Other open source CMS system require more hurdles to clear before you can actually use it.
- Licensing culture. The open source community has it's factions ranging from all things open and free to semi-open and fee based. Joomla is free and many of the 3rd party extensions are free as well however as development community they support commercialized 3rd party development as well as protected source code. Why does this matter to you? You may not know today where your website is going in the future. At some point you might want to develop an application that is a unique business solution and want to ensure that you can truly protect your intellectual property or you may want to commercialize the development itself as a revenue stream. The Joomla licensing environment will allow this and provide a layer of protection should you want to go down this path. Other CMS licenses and cultures frown up this if not openly reject this behavior and hold tighter the philosophy of open and free.
- Third Party Community. Joomla has the largest 3rd party community and is rapidly growing. The core development team behind Joomla activity and aggressive update and release new versions of the software that add greater programmability, increase security and additional user features. This attention to the foundation makes Joomla and ideal environment for developers to work in as they know they are fully supported. While the licensing of allows for closed commericalized development, the peer-to-peer culture within Joomla is very supportive and work together to share information and knowledge to help each other out as needed. Most problem's have a solution posted with in either the 3rd party product forums or the main Joomla forum. This cultural of "helping" isn't true of many of the other CMS solutions out there.
- Extensiblity. Business and Internet marketing goals change often. Joomla provides you easy and affordable options to extend and even change the whole nature of your site. While you might start off with basic web communications, Joomla can be easily extended into a social media site, e-commerce solution, blog, auction site, news aggrator or any other type of website you have seen on the web. Again this is attributed to the robust and highly active 3rd party development environment.
- Easy of use to lay person. Joomla is a very robust Content Management System providing administrators with a great deal of control over site management while at the same time allowing for streamlined access to daily users to their work quickly and easily. This easy of use can be extended via 3rd party extension to have any number of routine content management task done automatically. For example if you always have to create an intenal link to specific page within your site every time a name, product or phrase is used Joomla can automatically apply those links for you based on content rules you setup. There is no limit to the content rules you can establish with Joomla.
- SEO enhancements. Between the way the core system of Joomla works, 3rd party extension and customg development from TMA Guild, Joomla is very simply an SEO machine that gives you the most control over SEO treatments to you site while also providing "behind the scenes", automated SEO rules based on various conditions such as visitor, specific article, source of article, and so on.