Joomla is one of the most popular web content management systems commonly known as a CMS. It allows you to start a web site with minimum technical knowledge and effort in a minimum amount of time. The primary objective of such a CMS would be to separate the content of the web site from its technological design, so any non technical content writer could update the website without the help of a web developer.
Joomla provide all the above general functions to the users and many more including SEO friendliness and uncountable number of extensions/templates. So it always used to stand tall among CMS’. And It comes totally free and having very active development community and user community online. Therefore it was developing rapidly and users always get answers for their issue quickly. With all those pluses, Joomla was moving ahead, evolving to be the CMS in internet.
Recently Joomla community introduced Joomla 1.6 which attracted web developers as well as web content writers including website owners. If you take a deeper look you will figure out that, Joomla 1.6 is not just an ‘Upgrade’ like previous version evolution. It’s more than that!
Server Requirement
The most significant thing in Joomla 1.6 is it doesn’t work with old school web hosts. The minimum requirement of host Joomla is,
I see this as a really good step and minimum requirement would be satisfied by any decent web hosting service provider. In the development side, Joomla community will be able to use new technological advancement and provide smooth and nice product experience to users. If you are in an Old school web host, and planning to use Joomla 1.6 CMS, I guess time is ripe to move to a new decent web host.
What’s New?
More Control
The coolest feature in Joomla 1.6 which will attract the most is its controllability. It has taken the user permission to the next level. You can create user groups and assign permission to each group. Give privileges will be cascade to entire member of the group. This comes handy because most of the commercial web pages contents are uploaded my many people probably paid staff. And site admin need to give access to each section only for specific set of writers. With this each user will be able to see only his part of the web site to edit or may be view. Same would happen with administrative back and. Therefore this will be jump ahead in Joomla CMS and definitely this will contribute a lot to its future popularity and success.
URL Redirect Manager
This is another new feature in Joomla 1.6 and this URL redirect manager allows you to develop advanced routing between different site URLs. These redirecting may be static or may be depending on HTTP header details. If you need to direct entire traffic of URL ‘A’ to URL ‘B’ that will be a static redirection and you could modify the HTTP header after the redirection. Using this module you will be able to direct all your 404 errors to a nice page without letting user know something went wrong.
More impressively this provides built in tiny URL system. Hence you won’t have to use third party services to get your URL shorten. URL redirect manger will do it for you right inside your web application. In this case you might have to come up with creative sub domain configuration to make it better looking. The most important thing here will be you don’t have to depend on some other third party service and you will have the total control.
Multi Language Support
As always new Joomla also equipped with Multilingual support. You will be able to give a drop down menu to your user to change the language instantly by him. However to get this done you might have to create separate content for each language to get the optimum result why automated translators doesn’t always do a great job for all languages.
Most importantly new multi language support feature will allow you to create separate specific segments for each language. If you have some part of the web site that would be visible if language is selected to ‘French’ and that is irrelevant to ‘English’ , such kind of thing would be able to control using this new feature.
Components and Extensions
This could be a bad news as well as good news for both users and developers. Old Joomla extensions won’t work with Joomla 1.6 as long as it comes with totally different architecture. This will be a bad news for general non technical users because they will have to look for new version of extensions which are compatible with Joomla 1.6 and it will be good news for developers since they will get a room to come up with better creative extensions with new architecture.
However, I believe that this is a good move. In most of community development, developers are thinking about the old version of applications and its existence. But it only stagnate the evolution of the product and won’t let the developers to move on with advance tech. So, If you planning to move to (not upgrade) Joomla 1.6, account this fact as well.
Unlimited Nested Categories
This is a Joomla community request for a long and finally it’s been delivered by development community. Now you don’t have hard coded depth for your category hierarchy. You could create a nested category inside another category till infinity. This is really cool and expands the usability scope of Joomla. Most importantly this will be helpful for non technical users to manage their complex content without aid of a developer with much more flexibility.
Menu Structure
Joomla 1.6 comes to advance menu system management. It allows you to assign a page or even a module to a menu item. Further the management of menu hierarchy is made so easy for any one. The one of most important thing, Meta data management of menu item is been optimized and make it much more flexible. Top most important this is accessibility and visibility of menu item have taken to a unquestionable perfection level. Hence any level of user will be able to come up with user friendly as well as SEO friendly navigation structure for his web site.
Move to Joomla 1.6
As you could see from the above facts take your existing website to Joomla 1.6 is not just a simple upgrade. You will have to move entire web content to the new system to feel the power of Joomla 1.6. However, if you are starting a new web site, you can simply getting start with latest version of Joomla.
In the website migration process you will have to think about the web host first, whether it meet the minimum requirement of Joomla 1.6. In here you don’t have to worry about the capability of server computer hardware, it just software you have to taken in to account. Yet, with the increasing traffic you will have to look for better hardware and it won’t affect your Joomla website anyway. If your web host meets the requirement you will have to think about the extensions as well. You have to look for whether they have Joomla 1.6 compatible versions. If all set you are good to move!
Competition
Though Joomla is taking its shape to a perfect CMS with its version 1.6, it’s having tough completion in the CMS world. Drupal would be its main competitor. Most of the people say that Drupal is easy to understand and get on rather than Joomla. I personally don’t agree with it, yet I can’t deny the fact since many people made the same complain. So it will be good advantage for Drupal against Joomla.
Then comes the most popular blogging CMS, WordPress. It’s specialized for Blogging yet, it won’t stop you using it as a website CMS. It’s having entire features to develop a decent website including templates, plug-ins and other features almost same as Joomla. And installation is just few clicks and any non technical person would be able to move on with it. Learning curve of the CMS is also lesser. So there is a possibility that WordPress come out of its frame and give a significant challenge to Joomla.
SimpleCMS is another product out there which could give a solid head on challenge to Joomla. It give a very user-friendly interface to add and modify content. All you have to do is just click on the content after logging as authorized user. It will simply take you to edit mode and after saving things goes live. Same as Its name its ‘Simple’! And installation process is also very less complicate. Hence it was gaining raid popularity among web site administrators.
Further Evolution
Joomla will continue to evolve with its active development community. Probably they will look in to make it more users friendly to make it even easier for non technical users. Especially the installation script will come with less complicated mechanism. Content editing, page structure editing and navigation are already at the top as I can see. With all these Joomla will be able to solve the common complain ‘Significant learning curve’
Plug in and template availability is always a plus point for Joomla and it will continue with Joomla 1.6 as well. There might be some compatibility issues, but they will be solved soon. And there will be more extensions and more templates with this continuous evolution of Joomla. With all these Its taking its shape to be THE best web CMS.
Tags: #CMS #Joomla