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In the second part of our three-part series on selecting the best open-source content management system (CMS) for your requirements, we reached out to two organizations that opted for Joomla to discuss why they believed it was the ideal choice for them, how the migration proceeded, and if they were content with the outcomes. (To discover why other users selected WordPress or Drupal, see part 1 and part 3 of this series.)

Although Joomla was launched in 2005, which is after WordPress and Drupal, it has grown to become the second most widely used open-source CMS, boasting an ease of use that rivals WordPress while providing some of Drupal's power and adaptability, according to Paul Orwig, Open Source Matters' president, which is the nonprofit that supports the Joomla open source initiative. Joomla seeks a middle ground between its two open-source rivals, with a simplicity of use closer to WordPress, but it also provides some of Drupal's power and flexibility.

W3Techs, the web technology tracker, reports that approximately 2.7% of all websites use Joomla as of February 1st, compared to WordPress at 17.4% and Drupal at 2.3%. Joomla has been downloaded more than 36 million times, according to Open Source Matters, including over 9.5 million downloads in the preceding 12 months, representing a 27% increase.

Enterprises often choose Joomla as one of the top open-source CMS systems for building websites. Its simple interface makes it more user-friendly than Drupal, but coding skills are still necessary. Joomla strikes a balance between being easy to use and offering powerful customization options for content types.

One of Joomla's biggest advantages is its backend management and content display capabilities. You can set up user group permissions to allow or deny access to specific parts of your site and easily modify those permissions in the CMS. Additionally, updating your site's appearance does not require a complete rebuild of your content, saving you time and money.

While Joomla lacks an official template library, numerous developers have created thousands of premium templates for the CMS. The platform also features a visual editor and offers over 6,000 extensions to customize your site's look and functionality.

When it comes to blogging, Joomla is a popular choice for several reasons. Firstly, as a well-built Content Management System (CMS), Joomla has the capacity to handle high levels of traffic. This is a significant advantage for bloggers who expect a lot of visitors to their site.

Moreover, Joomla has an impressive track record, with over 70 million downloads worldwide, which translates to one download every 2.5 seconds. As a result, Joomla has become a trusted CMS, used by many reputable brands such as Pizza Hut, Kellogg's, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Gorillaz.

If you want to build a blog using Joomla, the first step is to set up your website on either a live server or Localhost. Fortunately, there are free tools available to install Joomla, such as cPanel. On Todhost servers, you can use either Softaculous or QuickInstall to quickly set up the latest version of Joomla with just a few clicks.

While many people are familiar with using WordPress to build a blog, this article focuses specifically on using Joomla. It aims to provide a clear and concise guide to getting started with Joomla.

Assuming that you have successfully installed Joomla, the next step is to configure your blog. This involves making decisions about how many article columns and rows you want to have. For example, if you want to create a blog with one article column and four rows, you can easily set this up in the Joomla backend.

Once you have completed the configuration, you are ready to create your personal blog using Joomla. Simply log in to the Joomla backend and start publishing your articles!

According to W3Techs, WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal are the most widely used open-source content management systems available today. However, choosing which one to use can be challenging for companies. While conventional wisdom suggests that WordPress is the easiest to use, Drupal is best for large and complex websites, and Joomla is somewhere in between, this oversimplifies the matter. All three CMSs have undergone significant development, with Drupal becoming more user-friendly, WordPress becoming more sophisticated, and Joomla offering a CMS as well as a web development platform. Furthermore, there are several free Drupal modules available to simplify development, and some suggest that Drupal's power can even make it boring. To stay updated on IT thought leadership, insights, how-to, and analysis, consider subscribing to Computerworld's newsletters.

This series examines how companies decide which open-source content management system (CMS) to use, by interviewing users of each system. The users explain why they chose their platform, what made it the better fit for their needs compared to the others available, and how they leveraged the strengths and addressed the weaknesses of their chosen platform. In this first part of the series, we focus on Drupal, and hear from two companies that chose it for their websites: Integrated Device Technology (IDT) and Fearnet, which offers an on-demand and traditional cable channel as well as a website.

If your website is running on the Joomla content management system and you haven't yet installed a critical update released less than two weeks ago, it's important that you do so immediately. A simple exploit could enable users to inject harmful content into your website, transforming it into a platform for phishing and malware. The patch released on July 31, 2013, applies to versions of Joomla 2.5.13 and earlier 2.5.x versions, as well as Joomla 3.1.4 and earlier 3.x versions. This bug was discovered by Web security firm Versafe, who report that attackers are already using a straightforward exploit targeting the vulnerability. Joomla versions 2.5.14 and 3.1.5 fix another bug that allows individuals without sufficient privileges to upload arbitrary .PHP files to a Joomla site just by adding a period to the end of PHP filenames.

For Joomla versions 2.5.x and 3.x, anyone with access to the media manager can upload and run arbitrary code simply by adding a period to the end of the file name. Even for sites running unsupported Joomla versions (1.5.x, of which there are apparently tens of thousands online), attackers do not need an account on the Joomla server for this hack to work.

According to the CEO and co-founder of Versafe, Eyal Gruner, more than half of the phishing and malware attacks against the company's 30+ EMEA financial clients in H1 2013 were hosted on Joomla-based websites. Gruner reported that the company identified more than 100 websites that had been hacked with this exploit, all containing malicious Javascript components that banking Trojans were using to facilitate online account fraud. The company informed Joomla about the exploit in early June.

In this review, we'll be taking a look at Joomla, which is a popular open-source CMS used by many around the world. To give you an up-to-date assessment of the platform, I'll be discussing my thoughts on the recently released version 2.5.6.

After installing Joomla, you'll be able to access the administrative interface. This will give you access to a variety of menus and screens that allow you to manage your installation. For example, you can access the site menu to configure basic settings for your Joomla site, including the ability to put it into maintenance mode.

One new feature in the 2.5 series is the ability to put your site offline and customize the message that users see. You can also choose to hide the site entirely and require users to log in to access it.

Joomla 2.5 comes with three options for editing content: TinyMCE (the default), CodeMirror (a code editor that allows you to write in HTML), and none (which disables the WYSIWYG option). The platform also offers basic SEO functions through its SEO Settings panel.

Overall, Joomla is a powerful CMS that offers many features and options for managing your website.