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Why other cms users have very little respect for joomla? Why companies don't use joomla?

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karencho5
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Why other cms users have very little respect for joomla? Why companies don't use joomla?

Post by karencho5 » Wed Oct 05, 2016 2:11 pm

Hello

I have been using joomla for quite sometimes now. I also have used other content management systems such as wordpress and drupal, but i choose joomla for most of my projects.

My first question is: Why other cms users have very little respect for joomla?

When people find out that I work with joomla the first thing they ask is why Joomla not wordPress or Drupal. Sometimes some people act very surprised that I still use joomla. Especially on the internet people are very negative towards joomla.

For example the other day I was browsing some [youtube] tutorials videos and I came across this comments.

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I would like to know why other CMS users have bad opinion about joomla?


My second question is: Why Companies don't use joomla?

I currently live in London and I would like to get a job as a joomla developer or anything related to joomla. I use these sites for my job search “reed.co.uk”, “indeed.co.uk”

There are NO Joomla jobs available :(

I have heard people say that joomla is the 2nd most popular CMS, over 68 million downloads.
If this is true then how come it is really hard to find joomla job in UK?

But, If you search for WordPress or Drupal jobs you get dozen and dozen of jobs.

Or maybe i am looking in the wrong place?

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Re: Why other cms users have very little respect for joomla? Why companies don't use joomla?

Post by itoctopus » Wed Oct 05, 2016 4:05 pm

You have 2 questions in your post and both of them are wrong. Most of those who have no respect for Joomla have never used Joomla and the rest are those who have used it a long time ago and got hacked because they never upgraded their sites.

As for your other question, no companies use Joomla, I assure you that many companies/organizations use them. These include: Intel, Citigroup,Wiley, NYU to name a few. WordPress is much bigger in terms of market share but only because it almost has no learning curve. WordPress code is more or less like Spaghetti code (no MVC) - most of those hiring WordPress developers are doing so because they are unhappy of the work of the previous WordPress developer (WordPress' development community is mediocre at best). Durpal is a very complex CMS, hence the demand for developers there. I know 2 companies that moved from Joomla to Drupal because of all those rumors about Drupal being more robust and secure, and both of them are reverting back to Joomla by the first quarter of 2017, simply because they discovered that the cost of maintaining and developing on Drupal is much much higher than that of Joomla.
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Re: Why other cms users have very little respect for joomla? Why companies don't use joomla?

Post by deleted user » Wed Oct 05, 2016 4:34 pm

Developers have little respect for Joomla because its code structure still largely resembles that of 2005-2007 coding standards and dislike the lack of modern practices within it (OK, that has some strength because the CMS can't make drastic changes every time a best practice changes, look how hard it is to migrate a Drupal site between major versions with minimal backward compatibility in the code).

Designers have little respect for Joomla because its default presentation layer configuration is based on something released in 2012. https://hackernoon.com/how-it-feels-to- ... .643oq4nqn applies just as well to the use of CSS frameworks as it does to the use of JavaScript IMO; everyone is more interested in the latest fad than tried and true practices.

Bloggers have little respect for Joomla because they view it as too difficult to work with and lacking "essential" features to set up a basic blog (the number of requests for a native commenting system is interesting to say the least).

Enterprise users have little respect for Joomla because it does not scale very well (it starts having performance issues when you get past 10,000 records in many of the tables).

Joomla has a good niche; everyone who uses it understands that. But it doesn't do very well promoting itself outside that niche or addressing the real issues that make it difficult to adopt in a wider range of scenarios.

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Re: Why other cms users have very little respect for joomla? Why companies don't use joomla?

Post by itoctopus » Wed Oct 05, 2016 5:12 pm

I agree about the performance aspect of Joomla - but, FYI, WordPress' limits without core modifications are not too far from Joomla. Generally (and much like Joomla), WordPress performance gets worse with every release.

Performance wise, the main Joomla bottleneck is in the articles model, which is a complete mess (there is a post in our blog about it) - additionally, some queries are run twice. The second Joomla bottleneck is the search (the smartsearch is also a mess because it causes issues - and I really hope that we get rid of it in Joomla 4) - but large websites should use Sphinx or Solr instead.

As for developers not liking Joomla because of its code - can you tell me a single real advantage, code wise, that WordPress has over Joomla? I'm not arguing here, I just want to learn. WordPress' code is spaghetti code (I'm sure you've seen it), Joomla's code is far from perfect, but it's not bad either.
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Re: Why other cms users have very little respect for joomla? Why companies don't use joomla?

Post by deleted user » Wed Oct 05, 2016 5:33 pm

I know the issues with WordPress performance. I've core hacked it quite a few times to eliminate duplicate queries and implement at least a request cache (even if it's not persistent, at least the data's persisting as long as the request is active). Not to mention adding a single index on the options table made a massive performance boost. And I laugh every time I hear someone say it performs better than Joomla; there's no way to do it without core hacking or third party solutions (seriously, there isn't even basic caching in WordPress).

com_content is not the only place in the core data structure that has issues. All of our nested tree data sets are flaky, the users data model (users, groups, viewing access levels) does not scale well, which affects the ACL model. The model classes in the MVC layer and JTable could do with some performance testing and improvements.

Search in Joomla is terrible. Neither "legacy" search or Smart Search are great solutions. Part of it is both are plugin based concepts which means they rely on an event system for anything to work and both have massively different logic (one is essentially using LIKE where conditions while the other attempts to build a smarter search index but again has scaling issues and does not work well outside English). Smart Search doesn't need to be completely removed. Search in Joomla in general just needs to be rewritten ground up and more closely built into the core system.

WordPress' advantage is that it has a lower barrier of entry for all skill levels (unless you have half a clue what you're doing; my profanity per minute rate increases exponentially any time I try to do something with a WordPress site) so people find it "easier" to do things. That's laughable. The last task I had to do was to add some style declarations and scripts to a page, but thanks to the order that WordPress renders the page there is not a way to correctly add these items to the page's head (or if there is I sure haven't seen it).

The one part of the WordPress API I think they've done even mildly right is their asset/media loader for scripts and stylesheets. Being able to declare dependencies and name the various assets in a way that the system can track what's been loaded is a good thing; JDocument uses the item URLs to do this. And the one thing WordPress got majorly wrong was giving a UI that allows users to edit plugin code in the admin section. NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER should users be editing plugins this easily.

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Re: Why other cms users have very little respect for joomla? Why companies don't use joomla?

Post by itoctopus » Wed Oct 05, 2016 6:06 pm

I agree with everything you're saying - with the exception of integrating the search in the Joomla core. I think it's more versatile the way it is currently built and I'm not sure if the search is integrated in the Joomla core it will be better.

Going back to WordPress, I think that they have lost their initial vision for the product. WordPress is no longer intuitive, and it's becoming increasingly complex. I don't know how people are claiming it to be the easiest CMS. It is easy if you're just using a basic template and adding a post every other week or so, but once you start demanding more from your website, the whole thing becomes a maze. The thing is, there is a huge ecosystem around WordPress that will do anything to prevent its demise.
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Re: Why other cms users have very little respect for joomla? Why companies don't use joomla?

Post by deleted user » Wed Oct 05, 2016 6:15 pm

Search is a double sided sword. On the one end, having it structured the way it is now (decoupled, hook system based approach) is great for being able to build a solution specific to your needs, and core comes with two approaches to pull this off. On the other end, the fact it's an entirely decoupled process and not tied closer to the core engine causes some performance issues and makes the integration of extensions into search more difficult (I've only written plugins for my code to work with Smart Search, which aren't compatible with "legacy" search, and I'm holding off on search integration for the new downloads site in part because it's going to mean us writing the plugins since the upstream provider doesn't have them and that's going to be a tricky process giving the multilingual configuration of the site). Tying a single search API to core and standardizing on one search component (and I would argue for Smart Search over legacy search; IMO it's a stronger search engine but it's not without its flaws by any means) would make the search integration better but that doesn't mean it has to be the only solution (think now how categories, tags, or content history are cross-component solutions with core utility APIs that make the integrations easier for those compared to how the only support for either search platform comes by way of the exposed plugin hooks).

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Re: Why other cms users have very little respect for joomla? Why companies don't use joomla?

Post by developerdev » Wed Oct 05, 2016 8:00 pm

Every CMS that is out there has it's own pros and cons. The amount of Wordpress updates that are released is insane. Typically the more updates the better but it also shows how vulnerable it really is.

Also the major updates can ruin the design layout of the website and some functions no longer working at all.

I would say Joomla and Drupal are more secure/robust, where as Wordpress has more options.
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Re: Why other cms users have very little respect for joomla? Why companies don't use joomla?

Post by sozzled » Wed Oct 05, 2016 8:34 pm

I'm comfortable with discussions that commence, seriously enough, with questions about why Joomla is so good or not so good but I am fairly confident that the seriousness of those discussions usually ends with an argy-bargy about Joomla vs. WordPress vs. Drupal vs. Lego® (or whatever else people use to build their websites with).
karencho5 wrote:When people find out that I work with Joomla the first thing they ask is why Joomla not WordPress or Drupal.
My experience is entirely different. When people find out that I work with Joomla, the first question they ask is "What's that?" 8)

I guess it depends on with whom you talk. Most of the people I talk to (about webcraft, that is) are clueless; all they're interested in is how they can promote their businesses on the internet. One of the last things I mention is how I actually build a website. Businesses are not interested in the technology; they're only interested in optimising the potential to achieve the best outcomes for success.

There are thousands of businesses around the world that use Joomla. Thousands of them! Is one website better or worse than another? Of course people can make subjective assessments about the merits of one site over another. Is the underlying technology used to construct a website "better" than another underlying technology? Again, it depends on what people require in order to operate and manage their site in association with their business goals.

I appreciate the robust contributions made by @itoctopus and @mbabker (both of whom have been around the game for a long time and whose contributions here and elsewhere are truly worthwhile). I may not always agree with their views but I respect them. I am sympathetic to @mbabker's opinion: "Joomla has a good niche; everyone who uses it understands that. But it doesn't do very well promoting itself outside that niche or addressing the real issues that make it difficult to adopt in a wider range of scenarios."

I don't think we need to blow our own trumpet or parade ourselves as better (or feel humbled) because other commentators may describe our work as worse or second-rate. I like to think of ourselves as a community of quiet achievers rather than a community of braggarts or needy of self-affirmation.

Returning to the original post, however, I understand that work opportunities for Joomla professionals may be limited in certain countries; perhaps that's just a cultural thing. I know that, in Australia, the penetration of Joomla in the "webcraft stakes"—the ways people construct websites for businesses—has steadily increased over time as the direct result small businesses that specialise in Joomla whose owners have successfully forged relationships with thousands of other businesses across the country. Are there opportunities for small businesses that specialise in Joomla? Of course there are.

If a business's first thought is "what technology should we use to build our website?" then it displays a complete lack of understanding of why they're in business. A business's first thought should really be about "how do we capture our share of the market?", not about "um ... er ... shouldn't we, perhaps, use <insert-product-name-here> to build our website instead of ... um ... er ... <insert-different-product-name-here>?" That kind of thinking displays their naïveté about why they're in business and, frankly, I would be reluctant to do business with them.

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Re: Why other cms users have very little respect for joomla? Why companies don't use joomla?

Post by deleted user » Wed Oct 05, 2016 11:52 pm

sozzled wrote:I don't think we need to blow our own trumpet or parade ourselves as better (or feel humbled) because other commentators may describe our work as worse or second-rate. I like to think of ourselves as a community of quiet achievers rather than a community of braggarts or needy of self-affirmation.
My problem isn't so much one of tooting our own horns, but rather who we're playing the concert for. My feeling is that a lot of our marketing effort is geared toward the existing community and user base and that we as a project don't do enough to market ourselves outside our existing community. One thing @darb likes to point out constantly is that there are often third party articles talking about WordPress and Drupal but often Joomla is not in the same conversation. In some cases this can be a good thing, in others its probably bad. I don't feel like we do enough at times to invite new users to our platform, and could honestly do massively better keeping our existing users interested. A post like https://www.joomlashack.com/blog/tutori ... ign=buffer is exactly what we should be publishing on our own domains; how much marketing material (either teasers like this blog or other things usually prepared with a minor release) is actually published before the release?

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