Joomla!

Functions

Joomla! positions itself in the marketplace as a CMS highly suitable for smaller websites, novice website developers, and web developers and designers creating websites for handover to small to mid-range clients. Much of its functionality is aimed at small business-type websites. To this end, it identifies a number of key functions of its product:

1. User management
   Includes personalisation according to user settings and access levels, as well as user authentication protocols.
2. Media manager
   Simple, non-technical management of media files for integration into web content.
3. Banner and template management
   Ability to manage design templates and banners separate from content development to aid in maintaining consistency of presentation. Banner management particularly relevant for those wanting to manage advertising campaigns (good for small business websites, for example.)
4. Contact management
   Manages 'Contact Us' type information, presenting it and making it searchable in different formats.
5. Search
   Internal search functionality built into the product. The search function also has the capacity to produce search statistics for the web administrator.
6. Polls
   Potentially useful as a 'quick and dirty' way of obtaining user feedback, Joomla! supports simple poll creation.
7. Menu management
   Supports menu creation, heirarchy, nesting, and breadcrumb creation, with a strong dynamic element.
8. Content management
   Ability to produce content without html coding skills, content archiving features and dynamic content production supported.

How to use

Because Joomla! is open source, anyone can download it and get started on implementation.

The Joomla! Create-and-Share website section provides a number of support, setup and development options for product users, including forums, the Joomla Community Portal, and user documentation.

Improving IA

Several of the features of Joomla! directly support information architecture practices. These include:

• Navigation. The 'Menu manager' feature enables menu creation, nesting and menu repurposing, and separates menu management from the web content itself. It also supports automatic breadcrumb creation, to improve navigation and findability of content.
• " The ability of Joomla! to separate template management from content development also has the capacity to improve information architecture by providing consistent visual and structural representation of content regardless of who is developing that content.
• An inbuilt search feature may also improve content findability and searchability.

In addition, usability is identified by Joomla! as a key value for the company:

"Usability" is a key value because we want everyone to be able to make use of our software, our documentation, our forums, and all our other sites. By making usability a key value, we hope to guide decision-making towards wider use and greater participation.
_{available from Joomla's Mission, Vision & Values webpage}

Given the criticality of usability to good information architecture, this is a significant indication of the philosophical values of Joomla! and the opportunity for Joomla! to improve information architecture.