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Current Status of Joomla: What You Need to Know

It is inevitable to uphold the quality of the website to keep your business at par with your rivals and generate high customer satisfaction levels. The quality of your websites and blogs is determined by their efficiency, usability, navigation capabilities and their design. Joomla is one of the best Content Management Systems and an open source solution available in the world today that can be used to create and manage your websites, blogs and mobile applications.

Apart from that, Joomla can be used to effectively manage different facets of your website; from adding content and images to updating a product catalogue, processing credit card payments or taking online service and product bookings. It is highly flexible so that it can be easily used and customized to suit your needs; and you don’t have to be a technical expert to add and manage content as it is user-friendly for a non-technical person as well. At present, Joomla is used across the world by the topmost corporate to small businesses, government and other organizations.

Brief history

Joomla was formed as a result of a fork of Mambo on August 17, 2005.Initially, Joomla developers created a website called OpenSourceMatters.org (OSM) to distribute information to users, developers, web designers and the community in general. On September 22, the new name Joomla was announced. It is the anglicised spelling of the Swahili word jumla meaning “all together” or “as a whole”, which also has a similar meaning in at least Arabic and Urdu.

Current status

Joomla CMS developers strive to give its users the world class CMS. As of now, Joomla 3.2 Beta version is the latest available software package to be used only for test sites. Full version 3.2 is likely to be released on 6^th November, 2013. Joomla 3.2 is loaded with hoards of new features. For a list of new features, please click here. With constant efforts to refine the software, current Joomla 2.5 version, a long term release holds a variety of features including protection from SPAMBOTS, smart search, use of broader platform, Captcha enhancements, multiple language support and much more. There are more than 7,000 extensions of Joomla available which can be downloaded and installed; and Joomla gets contribution from more than half a million active developers across the world.

Let us briefly discuss the features in Joomla 2.5 version:

1. Search smartly – The Smart Search feature digs deeply into the website content. It enables a visitor to access more accurate information he/she is looking for.
2. Protection from SPAMBOTS – SPAMBOTS are a kind of automatic spam that is spread by professional programmers to promote something. Joomla 2.5 identifies and protects your website from SPAMBOTS.
3. Auto-installs captcha extensions – Captcha extensions are meant to avoid clogging of junk and spam emails. Joomla 2.5 automatically installs the relevant extensions to keep your website at bay from such emails.
4. Support for multiple languages – Joomla is now available in different languages by default. It facilitates the users to choose the language of their choice without bothering to install extensions and complex settings prior to that.
5. Usage on a broader platform – Joomla 2.5 is flexible enough to be used across different operating platforms including Windows, Linux and etc. with no restrictions on adaptability as compared to its earlier version.

Other plus points for adopting Joomla CMS

1. Ease of content editing and addition – Joomla makes it easier for you to play with your content. Whether you want to upload, rename, delete images/videos, edit pages or re-structure your web pages, it is all done with no difficulty. You can also create links to other sections, categories, articles and weblinks.  Moreover, it allows you to update other features effortlessly with its simple customization process. Joomla allows you to add a set of tools to edit your content without having to learn HTML, XHTML, CSS and so on. JCE is one of the popular content managing extensions of Joomla with integrated spellchecking.

2. Integration with third-party modules – Joomla integrates with a variety of third party extensions including Wiki Linker, Hikashop, Moodle, Ambra User Manager, Facebook, Xmap and Salesforce to name a few. These extensions facilitate a lot of functions like social networking, e-commerce, site map generation, weather, help desk, security, administration, content sharing, editing, CRM, e-mail, accounting, calendar, documents, payments, mobile, photos, indexing and etc. Click here for the complete list of Joomla extensions. Not all third-party modules are included in the installation package but you can always download and install them separately.
3. Highly secured – Though security of the user content is the primary concern of Joomla developers as it is extremely important to protect your website from the ever-growing threat of hackers. But it requires an effort from your side as well to keep content secure. These are the key security tips to keep in mind to avoid breaches on your website. These include backing up data at regular intervals, using updated version of Joomla, keeping your extensions up-to-date, installing security plugins, using strong passwords and changing your default administrator login, default database table prefix and .htaccess file for improved security.
4. Authority to multiple users – Joomla controls access to various sections and features of a website with the help of a basic Access Control Level (ACL) mechanism called Groups. Different access groups allow different access levels to the user and a member of a particular group holds the rights specific to that particular group. Front-end group includes registered members, author, editor and publisher while the administration section group includes manager, administrator and super administrator. Even the third-party extensions of ACL mechanism are available but one should thoroughly check the usage of a particular extension as it changes the setting of currently installed extensions.
5. Reduce operational costs – Joomla helps you make an efficient, informative and most importantly a communicative website with all the required communication tools. By getting rid of paper communication with customers, Joomla helps the businesses to cut down its operational cost by creating an interactive online communication environment.
6. Easily manageable by a non-technical user – Joomla CMS is not limited to use by IT professionals/experts but it can be easily used by non-technical people to make speedy changes or additions to a website. Most of the tasks involved are automated and streamlined to give greater efficiency, convenience, time and cost savings to its users.
7. Scalability – Joomla websites are known for their scalability which means that by using different add-ons and modules, the user can enhance the functional capability of the website.  Users can do so by adding design templates, template customization, social networking related web development, module development, e-commerce related to web development, modification and maintenance & a huge range of website development tools.
8. SEO friendly – Joomla CMS provides a search-engine friendly platform, thereby, helping the users to increase website visibility in search engines. A number of tools can be used to reform your website as per your business needs, which ultimately drive traffic to your website; and higher the visibility of your website, higher is your sales and profitability. Meta keywords can be defined both at a global and page level. Even the HTML layout formed is crawler friendly.
9. Free availability –Joomla is a CMS, which has a variety of tools. One of the exciting reasons for its popularity is that such a platform is available for free and can be easily downloaded from Joomla website. Now, it is on the users’ capability or designers’ talent to design a perfect website to match your business requirement.
10. Not bound to any particular developer – If your designer charges you for Joomla, he is doing it for his talent to develop a customized website for you but again it is your responsibility to get quotations and extent of development from different developers to get best results. In case, you are not satisfied from your developer, you are free to change him and your website will remain intact as you own the copyrights to it.
11. Employed across the sectors – Joomla is not limited to any particular industry or task. It can be used for e-commerce, shopping, information sharing and communication, sales and marketing. Besides this, it can be used to make websites, portals, intranets, extranets, personal homepages and much more. Joomla finds its users across different sectors including hoteliers, tourism, government organization, corporate and small business owners, NGOs, schools, real-estate, retailing and other endless list of industries.