I have several clients I work with in my consulting business that need a Content Management System (CMS) to help them manage their website content. I’m not in the business of shanghai’ing my clients into using me to maintain their content. I prefer to concentrate on SEO and design rather than mundane content updates. They will come to me with major projects (like a new website or a redesign) and I will leave the content to them (assuming they want this, and they can understand how their content affects their search ratings).
I’ve been playing with several CMS systems lately that are popular in the community, and each one has benefits and drawbacks. The two I’m most interested in have been WordPress and Joomla. Since I know PHP I can get into the guts of the system quite easily and figure out what’s going on. I’ve been happy working with wordpress, but I’ve been daunted by Joomla more than once.
Today I really dug into Joomla and I’m liking what I see. The templating system it uses is pretty advanced and the module development process is well documented. I was able to use Ant to generate my templates so I can easily deploy them to customer sites when necessary. The same goes for the module development process.
One of the things that made me a little reserved about using Joomla is the sheer number of exploits I see coming out for Joomla modules. I’m a little worried that my clients will end up unknowingly put a vulnerable module on their site and have their database compromised or worse. The key to this is managing the system’s permissions. I can enable my clients to do just about everything they want with their content without giving them the ability to compromise their own systems by uploading vulnerabilities into it.
All in all, I’m rather happy with the choice of Joomla for cheap (free) CMS for my customers. There’s a good chance I will be writing some modules for it in the near future and I’ll let you know how that goes.