Professional Joomla!

Chapter 15. What Joomla! Can't Do

As you know by now, Joomla is a phenomenal Content Management System (CMS). On the CMS Matrix Web site (www.cmsmatrix.org), which tracks features of all of the major CMS applications, Joomla has 124 out of 140 features listed for comparison. The tremendous feature list makes Joomla comparable to systems that sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. However, there are areas where Joomla lacks the sophistication or advanced implementation that would make another CMS application a better choice for certain types of deployment.

This chapter provides a snapshot of some of Joomla's shortcomings as of this writing. Joomla development continues, and many of these features are slated for addition to Joomla in the coming years. However, other CMS vendors will not be idle either, so this chapter will portray Joomla accurately as it can be compared with other products in the near future. When Joomla adds a first version of a given feature, the products that already include the feature will likely be releasing version 2.0 capabilities. Therefore, this chapter should continue to provide an effective way of judging Joomla's deficiencies in relation to other products of the CMS category.

Some Joomla proponents would argue that many of Joomla's shortcomings can be overcome by adding available extensions. In the cases where a widely adopted extension integrates a particular feature in a seamless way (the way Virtuemart adds e-commerce capabilities), I have not included ...