Over the last decade there’s been a huge growth in the number of prebuilt components available to website designers and programmers, especially those written in the PHP programming language. It saves a great amount of time when you are able to create websites from these, rather than writing them entirely from scratch, and allows far more to be provided for smaller budgets than would previously have been possible.
While its possible to keep abreast of most of the developments available in this area, its very difficult to be proficient in working with every available package. We specialize in customising Joomla and WordPress Content Management Systems.
Important advantages of Joomla are:
[ulist style=”2″]
From the point of view of longevity of the website, there is a huge 3rd party development community, which makes it very easy for any future developers to continue or update the websites if needed.
It’s extremely modular, which means that future website extensions don’t require starting from scratch and losing existing work. There are already hundreds of 3rd party components available and in the following list of proposed solutions you’ll see that most can be provided by customising already existing components.
From a maintainability viewpoint, Joomla is written in PHP 5 which allows it to be object oriented and more modular right down to the source code. By embracing the most current programming methodology, it’s then easier for any subsequent developers of a project to take over where a previous one left off.
Considering security, the Joomla framework is updated several times each year to maintain integrity of, and provide advances in security. The security updates can be installed each time without changing the site content or presentation.
[/ulist]
WordPress ( www.wordpress.org ) doesn’t provide the same fine-level of control for presentation as Joomla! but makes it far easier to get found in search results. It started as a blogging application, but has evolved into a reliable publishing platform. Although out-of-the-box, it’s simpler than Joomla, it can be extended quite easily to provide nearly all the same things.
A standard WordPress installation provides:
[ulist style=”2″]
the ability to edit existing website pages, including the upload of images,
the ability to add further pages and manage menu items,
a search function.
[/ulist]
It can be extended with:
[ulist style=”2″]protected pages available only to logged in users. If the page is navigated to by someone who hasn’t logged in, they’ll be presented with a login form instead, allowing registration and access to additional website content.
forms
a simple online shop
[/ulist]
Tailored / Customised components
Components and package code on the web are constantly being improved and released as improved versions. This is good, yet when it comes to customising a component developed by others, it results in the need for a special handling.
If a component is customised by a party other than the original developers, then updates provided by them are unlikely to install correctly. This prevents an end-user with little programming knowledge from performing an installation themselves. The solution is to have the developer who performed the customisation handle the upgrade, which is an easy solution, but should be noted as it will likely incur a charge.