Joomla
Joomla is described as a "dynamic portal engine and content management system" and is a very popular free and open source "Integrated Solution" to website creation. It allows for typical site architecture schemes as well as allowing for a robust user management system with varying levels of access control on both the administration and front ends. Joomla is available to be downloaded from Joomla.org.
Joomla.org is a site created in Joomla
Installation Requirements
Joomla requires an Apache web server running:
- PHP 5.2 or greater
- MySQL 5.04 or greater
Because of the complexity of the Joomla CMS and the easily created potential for it to crash an entire webserver, Joomla is not typically available via a free hosting solution.
Ease of installation/use
Joomla is the most complicated of the three CMS tools reviewed for this assignment. The abundance of choices available at installation, and also the addtion of numerous modules available to add to its functionality make anything but a basic Joomla install probably unsuitable for those with no web development experience. The styling and templating system that Joomla employs, although successful at separating presentation from content and adhering strictly to the Model-View-Controller pattern, is also notoriously difficult for the amatuer web developer to easily grasp.
IA Considerations
Joomla out-of-the-box provides for a well-polished design and a sensical site structure. Joomla provides for both top and side navigation systems, and these are easily configurable by using the "menu manager" administration tool. Joomla allows for multiple menus, and multiple heirarchies within each menu. Unlike the two other CMS tools reviewed though, Joomla does not automatically create menu items out of site content, content must be first created, then the "menu manager" used to place a link to this content in a menu. Joomla permits automatic site map creation, however the inability to control what gets mapped (at least in this reviewers experience) tends to create site maps that are not very useful and only serve to overwhelm the user with too much information (Morville & Rosenfeld, 2007, p. 132)
The level of customisation allowed by this menu system is both a blessing and a curse. In the hands of an experienced information architect this CMS can allow you to create multiple heirarchies and section-based local navigation systems (Morville & Rosenfeld, 2007, p. 124), but without a lot of thought put into menu creation the site architecture can easily become unusable and also quite hard to fix without risk of losing pages, or even entire sections.
Joomla allows for far greater search grouping (Morville & Rosenfeld, 2007, p. 175) than MediaWiki, allowing users to search just articles, or newsfeeds for example. You can also manually create other categories and Joomla will allow searching based on these. Joomla provides a basic search function and also an "advanced" search module allowing "all" "any" or "exact phrase" boolean-like search filtering. Results can be ordered by date or 'popularity', among other options.