I love Joomla!  Joomla offers both website developers and business owners a great content management system (cms) which allows a great deal of freedom on what you have on your site as well as great Joomla 1.5 templates that make your website look very professional, instantly.

The one thing I have found with Joomla 1.5, although it is much easier to use (in my opinion) than it’s Joomla 1.0 counterpart, you still have to retrain your brain into geek mode to be able to figure out the logic.  I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, it’s just something to be aware of.

I’ve given countless hours of Joomla training and once people understand the basics, away they go happy in the knowledge that they know how to build their own website using Joomla and that they now have control over their website.  If they need a paragraph added or a new article added, they can do it themselves, without having to pay a website developer or designer to change it, not to mention having wait to get it done instead of being able to add it there and then.

There are other content management systems out there, infact there are quite a few sites build using Wordpress which is a great platform for blogging and basic sites but doesn’t give you the functionality that Joomla gives.  There is also Drupal and PhpNuke as well as a few others.  I haven’t tried to build sites on other platforms other than in html coding and Joomla is sooooo much easier that doing that, even with the learning curve you need to go through to learn how to use it.

Although Joomla is a self contained content management system you still need access to either cpanel or plesk or which ever control panel that is on your hosting account.  Why do you need access to your control panel?  Most, if not all, of the templates when you edit any of the css (cascading style sheet) files they lock the file so you can’t edit it again.  A problem therefore if you need to change it again and you don’t have access to your control panel or file manager.

I am presently creating a series of training videos which should be ready within the week to demystify the world that is Joomla!  I also offer Joomla training, at the moment I have individual training packages available and group training is planned for March.  Let me know if you are interested.