I was asked by a friend of mine a couple of days ago about the reason I was so excited about Joomla. That made me look with an objective eye at this CMS and gave me the idea about writing this editorial presenting the best parts and some minuses that Joomla has.

For starters, Joomla is good for any type of site, from the little leaflet type to great corporate sites that contain great amounts of data. It is very easy to install, populate it with content and maintain. You don't have to be a doctor in physics to use it. You don't need to know HTML, PHP, MySQL or how to programme stuff in order to use Joomla.

Joomla has a backend administration section. From here you can do anything: publish, edit, add images, organise your content in sections and categories (see our tutorials about that).

It is all very logic, clear and simple.

For the front end, you can apply a template available on the internet (or made by yourself) and make your site look the way you want it to look. The templates allow you to fully customise the way your site looks. Are you tired of the old design? Change the template! It takes a few seconds to do it. You don't need to hire a web design company to redesign your site.

So, for the best parts of Joomla I would count the following:

• easy to install and use
• the possibility of search engine friendly URL's
• multiple language support
• WYSIWYG editor for your text
• statistics
• component, module and template installer
• lots of add-on's available
• speed up your Joomla by using the browser's cache
• integrated Help
• meta tags and key words support
• the greatest community ever

The minuses that I see are not really strong minuses but mild ones (if I can say so...and I can):

• not standard compliant
• the impossibility for the visitors of your site of commenting on your articles (unless you install a third party add-on)
• the impossibility to associate an article to multiple categories or sections
• some security bugs (that the dev team is working hard to fix - and Joomla becomes more and more secure with every new version)

So, this is my view of Joomla in short. Go ahead, use it and share your experience!