Joomla! vs. Netlify CMS

It seems with the release of Joomla! 4 that the weak areas have all been covered. Its always been good for the mid-level small to large business, the blogging was WP, and the large-scale enterprise was probably bespoke. But the new interface is so simple it seems pointless using WP when Joomla! is as easy and can then grow as big as you like. The Workflows feature which allows you to set up work pipelines easily is going to be a boom to any larger enterprise sites. Couples with the new API which I got to see at one of their user groups, is amazing. They were creating articles on one site then another site was taking the feed directly for just certain categories. Really blows your mind what you could do with that and the new workflows.

Netlify CMS is well suited when you have very less frequent updates to your content, maybe once a day and very few people need to access your data. You can connect it to Netlify, GitHub, or any platform and have multiple people access it and do as many updates as you wish, but the process is not well-defined and you need to build your own system for that. It is well suited for projects you need to pull off with very low cost, it is essentially free as the software is open source and free to use, and all you need to do is set up your schema correctly and find a deployment pipeline where you can build your static site/API to redeploy whenever the content changes. I personally used a GitHub Login -> Netlify CMS -> next app consumer of content -> GitHub pipelines to run next SSG -> GitHub Pages to deploy the built static site. It might not be appropriate for large teams where users themselves need no-code tools to modify the schema of the content.

Incentivized

• We use Joomla to build our websites and web applications because of its incredible intuitiveness and tools to make everything more manageable.
• Its working environment is quite comfortable for my development team, and its web design resources significantly speed up our work when carrying out web development projects.
• It allows you to use blocks to create and visually manage websites and divide them into different categories without programming knowledge.

Incentivized

• Storing content data in customized schema without a database
• Full control over your content and infrastructure where it is deployed and stored
• Very low-cost way for building your own CMS and CDN

Incentivized

• Updating was never as seamless/easy as it seems to be with Wordpress. Obviously we accounted for this with our own workflow/methods, but I remember whenever we did WordPress updates it always seemed a breeze compared to the time/energy involved with a Joomla update/upgrade.
• For a while (I think this has changed some) Joomla left itself open to attacks when administrators were not as well versed as they should be. There were developer additions that did security checks/audits for you, but the CMS was the subject of a lot of attacks when left in the hands of our clients for a long time (who had changed permissions to make editing easier/convenient). Ideally the CMS would have been more restrictive on some of these things to prevent easy abuse. Obviously this is more the fault of the misinformed/human then the CMS, but it could have been more dummy-proof.
• No native versioning. There are some community extensions that add this functionality, but they pale in comparison to the versioning plugins of other CMS's (WordPress specifically). Again this was some time ago and in our experience, it could have changed by now.

Incentivized

• Linking between different schema types, i.e. having some relations between content
• Better ways to define content schema, like how TinaCMS would handle using a JSON

Incentivized

I gave it a rating of 10 because I just love how Joomla! works, how it is set up and how it handles many users. Also it is very fast, and there is no overload on the MySQL database or servers ever.

Incentivized

The user experience and interface are good, but sometimes it is down. Delayed in the loading speed. Workflows can be simplified, and understanding templates needs much time. It is user-friendly and with multi-language support. Users can be added to the groups, which is easier. User controls can also be created based on role-based permission.

Incentivized

Today's Modern Joomla performs very well and is robust and durable. The pages load faster than they ever did in the past and Modern Joomla's integration into other software or systems has become seamless. Modern Joomla sites will last long and will stay running forever.

Incentivized

Between the core Joomla developers who are excellent at answering questions and providing support, you have a whole community of developers who work with Joomla and are happy to help fellow developers out answering questions and supporting the Joomla project. Out of the many communities I am involved in for open-source software, Joomla's community is by far the best.

Incentivized

It is good if you know Joomla! if not it can get a bit confusing

Make sure that PHP.ini is set to at least 60 ms for computer priority, 60MB for maximum downloads and 128MB for uploads. This is the minimum. It is best to run Joomla on a business host if you are using a shared hosting environment so that there are fewer accounts on the server. Make sure you have access to the root on CPanel. Be sure to point the DNS to the host and set up all zones prior to implementation and run your new version in a sub-domain hidden from the live version until you are ready to cut over.

Joomla is a very stable and secure CMS platform that ranks about in the middle of the pack with the other 'modern day' CMS systems out there. It's not as complex and frustrating as Magento, but it's also not as easy or robust to work on as WordPress. Thankfully when we do utilize it, there's still an online community our we can bounce issues and ideas off of.

Incentivized

We really can't compare it to full-fledged CMS software, like WordPress, which has a lot of community and support with widgets, plugins, and whatnot. It's not built for that, but you can compare it to Contentful, Ghost, Strapi, etc., which provide similar functionality to a headless CMS with custom schema options, but even among them, it still lacks a lot of functionality, ease of use, and support. But Netlify CMS pros would be of the opinion that compared to other platforms where most schemas need to use their own tools and frameworks, it's very cost-effective. Something new called TinaCMS has come up to compete with Netlify CMS by covering most of its shortcomings, but it's something new being built by the same team that built Forestry CMS and comes with many modern features, yet currently only supports NextJS SSG.

Incentivized

• Deploying Joomla! for clients has helped them discover the benefits of using Open Source software while helping them appreciate our expertise.
• Because the Joomla! community is smaller than the WP community, we are able to reach a wide range of clients looking for experts in the software, boosting our bottom line.
• Occasionally a client will find Joomla! too complicated and wish to move to a proprietary DIY CMS, which we do not support, so we have lost clients looking for that level of flexibility.

Incentivized

• Helped us inject dynamic content into existing site very quickly
• Wasted a lot of time to implement when something complex, such as querying content, was needed

Incentivized