Inspire Joomla competency

Core competencies: Joomla!

Joomla! is a content management system (CMS) for publishing web content.  It’s open-source, free to download, but it’s not very easy to use: it does help to know what you’re doing.  Still, it’s the second most popular CMS after Wordpress.  Joomla! works on most platforms and it has over 7,700 extensions, so you can do pretty much anything you want with it when you know how.

Where did it get its odd name?  The story is that the guys who run it held a competition to find a name, then decided they didn’t like any of the suggestions and chose something completely different.  Jumla is a Swahili word meaning “all together”; apparently there are similar words with the same meaning in Amharic, Arabic and Urdu, too, which covers a large chunk of the globe’s population.  The spelling was altered, presumably for trade mark reasons; the exclamation mark is part of the registered name.

Now we’ve cleared that up, how is Joomla! used?  Well, it runs on MySQL databases and uses the PHP programming language, both of which are standard fare for web developers.  It can be installed with the Microsoft Web Platform installer on Windows.  Once you’re installed the basic system, you add extensions.  There are five extension types, which handle different functions.

The most complex extensions are Components.  These are driven by menu items and produce most of a web page.  Then there are Plugins, which deal with events such as blocking pop-ups.  Templates are used for the style and appearance of a site – they’re the graphic designer’s toolkit.  Modules link with Components to display new content or images.  Finally there are Languages, some of which are integral parts of Joomla! while others are extensions.  With over 7,700 extensions there’s plenty of choice in all five categories to allow our web developers to create the perfect set-up for your requirements.

Of course, you can build your own Joomla! site but, as I mentioned, it’s not very user-friendly.  Unless you’re a competent coder you won’t get the result you want: you’ll spend your life tweaking, trying to get the site to do what you need.  In the long run that works out much more expensive than getting a bespoke site to start with. 

Here at Inspire, we know our way around the Joomla! system.  In fact we've helped many businesses, individuals and organisations around the world who've tried to develop their own Joomla website and then got stuck. These clients have accessed our Developer SOS service where we have helped them get back on track.

That said we can also build exactly the site you need, avoiding years of frustration for you and your customers and potentially saving you a lot of money.  Joomla! is only just one of the CMSs that we are experts in using at Inspire. 

It does need to be maintained though with regular version updates required on Components, Plugins, Templates and programming language versions. This can often be beyond the novice developer which is where we can help.

At Inspire we prefer not to build sites to a template: we sit down with you and discuss your needs in depth, discover exactly what you want to achieve from your website, and then build your site individually to suit those needs.  Get in touch today and find out how we can help.

David Dwyer is Managing Director of Inspire Web Development. He has years of experience in a range of web and IT roles plus seven years in sales and marketing in a blue-chip FMCG company. David’s academic and professional qualifications include a BA (Hons) in Business Economics (Personnel & Ergonomics) from the University of Paisley, an MSc in Information Technology (Systems) from Heriot-Watt University and PRINCE2 Practitioner-level certification. He is also an active member of the British Computer Society, Entrepreneurial Exchange and Business for Scotland.

Follow Inspire on Twitter @inspireltd and @developersos