Joomla – simple CMS for smaller sites
Recently I've been looking for simple CMS to use it for my son's nursery website. I wanted it to be:
- free
- PHP based (I have hosting that is Linux based)
- very simple to use - I wanted this site to be edited and updated by teachers from nursery
- extensible - to easily add new functionalities (like for example gallery)
- I wanted to limit the development to minimum - meaning no development at all as a goal
- free templates should be there - to use with chosen CMS
If you check sites like for example: CMS Watch you will see that it is not easy to choose the proper one. I checked quite a few of CMSes but at the end I had only three to choose from: Drupal, Joomla and... Umbraco. The last one was a little bit surprising since it didn't fulfill my initial requirements - it is .Net based - but I had some experience with it from my work and it is similar to EPiServer in many areas .
After playing with demos ( Drupal demo site, Joomla demo site) I decided to perform test installation. I stared with Joomla because I didn'tliked Drupal at all (based what I've seen in demo site) and I knew Umbraco from work. I installed it and it occurred that I it was good choice 
Just from playing in administrator mode I was able to build the site I was looking for - with functionality, structure and everything I needed.
Next step was to find template that was right for kindergarten site - and also in this area Joomla was the right choice. There is a lot of sties with Joomla free templates.
Finally, it occurred that after two days of work I managed to build the working site - ready to be publish :) There was only one surprise for me - the way how pages were organized. I was used to "tree" structure - after all those projects with EPiServer . In Joomla editor has two "tools" to organize pages in the site:
- each page has to be assigned to section and category. Primary use of sections and categories is to make kind of listing pages. There is possibility to create page that list all pages in section (from all categories) or all pages from chosen category. Also thanks to this it is easier to find pages in administrator view.
- menus - if there is no tree structure there is nothing we can based menus on... So menus in Joomla are built from scratch. Administrator has to build the desired menu structure ("tree") and for each node he/she has to select the type of the node. And there are many to choose from:
- article - menu node will be just link to article,
- category - list all pages with chosen category,
- section - list all pages with chosen section,
- external link,
- search page,
- start page,
- many more...
At last I was able to built the kindergarten site: Przedszkole nr 6 w Bochni (site is in Polish ). I also created for them Google Apps account - for domain przedszkole6.bochnia.org - as e-mail service and Picasa account as a pictures storage. Which all together makes quite nice connection and application (almost like SOA 
)
After this "project" - from my perspective - those are pros and cons of Joomla:
Pros:
- free
- really easy to install
- installed version is ready to work with and easy to customize
- huge number of extensions: Joomla extensions site
- easy to find free template,
- templates are quite easy to modify
Cons:
- no tree pages structure - structure of pages is flat,
- menus has to be created from scratch (can be advantage in some cases),
- when linking to the page in WYSIWYG editor there is no internal type of link - so editor has to copy paste URL, instead of have possibility to choose from existing pages directly from WYSIWYG add link dialog,
- lack of possibility to add access right to chosen section/category - for example to create administrator account for news updating. There is only administrator and editor kind of roles. Good thing is that editor can set right to only edit and another role to publish.
I think it is very good CMS for smaller sites with not that many pages. I think that with lager sites lack of tree strcuture might cause some problems in flexible management of the site. I haven't tested performance yet, I will do it and let you know how it went.