[Why you should choose Joomla] The power of Joomla functionality

Talking about the debate of Joomla versus other CMSs, we can probably write some books.

But let’s not do that. Since choosing Joomla or any other CMS, is pretty much based on personal preference.

Here in my “Why you should choose Joomla” series, let’s focus on what Joomla does best, and better to help clear the old – and wrong – perception about Joomla.

If you haven’t read, here is the first part:

[Why you should choose Joomla] Joomla extensions & templates are the greatest weapons

Now, let’s take a look at the power of Joomla functionality and how you can easily use this power to build your website.

Easy installation

Joomla gives you an easy setup and a simple starting boost. Even if you are a beginner, you can totally build a dynamic website starting with an easy installation within seconds. That is just for Joomla 3, Joomla 4 installation is even simpler.

Easy to update

If before, updating Joomla could easily turn into a nightmare when you needed to migrate your site data to update.

However, now upgrading Joomla from version to version is something you don’t even need to worry about. And it’s just as easy as WordPress: you can update to the latest version of Joomla with just one single click.

There is a built-in updater added in Joomla to automatically check if you need to update anything. Plus, from Joomla 3.5, with the new email update notification plugin, you – as the Super Admin of your site, will be notified of the new Joomla version.

Multilingual support

You can’t underestimate Joomla when it comes to multilingual functionality. Because multilingual support is the core feature in Joomla, everything you need to run a multilingual website is right in the core. Currently, Joomla supports 66 languages in total.

More importantly, Joomla can perfectly handle its content in different languages. Joomla lets you build a multilingual website without having to install a third-party extension. You just need to go to the Language Manager and have your content ready in another language here.

Also, you can set Joomla in the languages you want right from the installation step too. This feature is very convenient since it won’t mess with your site’s templates or extensions.

Content management

I have to say, when you want your website to be more complex and to have more control over it, WordPress can easily slip into a mess. It takes you more effort and knowledge to advance WordPress to the same level that Joomla does.

Joomla offers its users a wide variety of custom creation methods which can be easily personalized. Additionally, with the rise of page builders like JSN PageBuilder 3, Joomla makes no stumble for you to build a perfect Joomla page.

There are people believe that Joomla is the CMS with the capability of the blog while WordPress is just a blogging platform with the capability of a CMS. Can you guess the difference in the power of the two?

Joomla at its heart is a content management system with many great features to make your site content as simple as a breeze.

If you want a different layout for your page, Joomla modules will help you do that. Plus, if you use page builder, you can add whatever element you want inside your page just by drag-and-drop and browsing the pre-made elements in page builder.

What’s more? Joomla also has the content versioning to keep different versions of your site content so you can switch back to the older version anytime. WordPress is not the only CMS that can do this.

Extensive in-built ACL

One of the prominent powerful features of Joomla is its Access Control List where allows you to manage all users of your site in all levels and all user groups.

Joomla ACL literally gives you full power to manage a huge intranet with complex user accessibility levels.

This feature is far more advanced than of WordPress and it supports even third-party extensions too. Developers really love this feature since it makes their administration job much less tiresome.

From Joomla 3.6, it allows you to control ACL at menu level. That means you can give or block certain user groups access to a specific menu or all menu items of that menu.  Plus, you can filter your users in the backend by the date they last visited your website to focus on more active accounts. Also checking which access levels a user group belongs to is damn easy now too.

Usability

In terms of usability, Joomla is quite similar to WordPress. However, it’s somewhat more dominant.

Firstly, you can build any type of website you want with Joomla, from eCommerce to a membership site. There are many extensions (like VirtueMart, OpenCart, J2Store) for a high-end Joomla eCommerce similar to what WooCommerce does in WordPress.

If it’s a social network, Community Builder, JomSocial and EasySocial will give you everything you like.

Joomla comes with a lot of built-in options to create various websites. It also has a lot of powerful extensions that further improve its capabilities. While WordPress also has many plugins, Joomla appears to offer a lot more native support for complex website’s needs.

Additionally, Joomla offers users structural stability and attractive intuitive interfaces.

Talking about “easy to use” level, people believe that Joomla is hard to learn. That’s not true.

Joomla gives its users a graphical admin interface where you can add articles, media, menus, extensions, and languages, etc. as well as change the settings via just a single mouse click. WordPress admin – to compare- is just nowhere matches.

You say too many options given will confuse the first time users? I think not. A non-developer user like me when using Joomla the first time, looking at its out-of-the-box admin, still know where I need to go if I want to create a menu, to make a module or to add a blog article. Learning Joomla, at first sight, is hard – it is just a myth passing from time to time.

Overall, I think most people should be able to learn how to create and run Joomla sites very quickly (while WordPress might seem easier at first, it will need you to spend more time learning to create other features that Joomla directly makes them available in its core).

SEO support

Okay, many people skip Joomla just because it’s not SEO friendly. And WordPress is better for SEO. That’s an old story that you need to forget right now.

From Joomla 2.5, Joomla SEO is almost as good as that of WordPress. And from Joomla 3.5, with the update to the latest PHP version, Joomla is 2x faster and it has many things improved to be much lighter at its core. Guess what? Your website now loads faster when running with Joomla.

You also have the tagging system with metadata support in Joomla to facilitate your site’s SEO.

Moreover, through each Joomla version, there's much less work to make it become a super user-friendly as well as search engine friendly CMS.

Joomla shines!

There are many other things Joomla can do, and do on a more advanced level than other CMSs. If I could list every single awesome feature of Joomla here, I’m afraid it would become a novel.

The point here is, for those who are still believing that Joomla is hard or Joomla doesn’t have this and that – it’s just because you haven’t actually made a thing with Joomla and learned it seriously.

Next time, let’s discuss about Joomla power in its security. Don’t miss it!

Full series of Why you should choose Joomla:

• Episode 1: Joomla templates and extensions
• Episode 2: Joomla functionality
• Episode 3: Joomla security
• Episode 4: Joomla easy of use

What do you think? Let’s discuss in the comment section below.