Open-source Content management.

I've only managed to dip my toe into the waters of the CMS industry from time to time. The sheer size of the industry can make choosing one a bit overwhelming at times but I'm always intested to see what the latest developments are. More recently, I have started setting up clients with their own websites. Many clients just want an "online presence" and they don't even know what a CMS is, let alone if they want one or not. So we just make it a standard practice to supply them with a free one.

Every now and then, a product comes along that is so "disruptive" that it has enough critical mass to make it's own gravity field. This is usually evidenced by proliferation of satelite products that spring up in response to it's success. Joomla is so new, I could not find any articles on it at CMS Watch . Yet when you look around then net for all things Joomla related you have everything from Joomla template vendors, to Joomla extension vendors, to Joomla specific hosting and not to mention design services and general support.

As for my personal experience with the product, it's early days, but it has blown me away with it's professionality and has impressed me enough to commit to using it as the platform for my clients online presence. This is a pretty big commitment given that this implies that I am willing to provide professional support to Joomla long-term. Here is why I personally like Joomla:

• It has a very active community and a well organised homepage
• It will run on common ISP's PHP setups with no real special requirements
• It is an absolute breeze to install thanks to it's intelligent auto-detections
• It has a solid API that is well defined and well (improving) documented.
• It is extensible in multiple dimensions (at least 3 formal extension APIs)
• It makes extentions easy to create and install due to the use of XML descriptor files. This also facilitates catering for Joomla extension creation in IDEs.
• The templating is simple, yet flexible
• It is pure open-source
• The Admin interface is very pretty and works well. This is important for collegues and customers.
• It is very user-friendly. The Admin areas is very logical and well laid out.
• Already has a vast array of free extensions available for it - including all the important types (gallery, forum, wiki, eCommerce etc).
• And last but not least, they have catered to many little details - which make using the system a pleasure.

Bear in mind that the Joomla project is the result of a split in the Mambo (another open-source CMS) scene where the commercial company that instigated Mambo saw fit to leave many of the core developers (open-source contributers) out of the Mambo Foundation they set up. Often you will see the prefix "mos" - which refers to Mambo Open Source (as there was a proprietary/commercial version of Mambo as well).

Go have a look see at http://www.joomla.org