Joomla

And so I built a very simple PHP, ef- actually it was an ASP system back then, Microsoft, and, um, a quick editor, basically, a quick, you know, web-based editor.

And the customer asked for a certain problem, and I was trying to research it, and lo and behold, I found something called Mambo, which Mambo was actually an Australian CMS, very, very early one, which became Joomla.

And Joomla, I'm surprised your research didn't find that.

There was a time there where I was very heavily involved in that community, and Joomla was a CMS.

Now WordPress is a CMS.

Yep.

Yeah, this is something we've definitely talked about, right? The implementation is really simple on that side of things.

In Joomla or WordPress, it's literally a line of text in the article editor.

The hard part is not the CMS.

The hard part is getting the owner to commit to a number.

But the thing I always, the reference point I have is, I've been WordPress since 2006 or so, started my own blog and all that.

Joomla was still out there.

And there is still market share.

All these years later, no matter if WordPress and other things have gotten better and all that kind of stuff, there's still a significant...

It's smaller, but not in terms of the web.

There's still a significant... base running Joomla like that's one of the things is like you know it costs money to change a website to go from Joomla to WordPress WordPress whatever that is and so you still see these sites out there with the percentage of market share and I just go Joomla you know so I don't have a crystal ball and I can't predict it but I just go from a realistic practical manner you know organizations spend thousands and tens of thousands perhaps of dollars to launch their websites and And then turn around and go, wait, can that be just overnight? No, often not.

And so maybe the technology gets out there and probably will at some point in the future.

But I go, there's this interim time.

Interesting.

Right? Joomla, Droopa.

Yeah.

But nobody told me that the world was going to be like this.

code to

programmatically ding you on things and then introduce Joomla, WordPress, Drupal, whatever, where, okay, properly formatted HTML made a difference because the bots couldn't parse the HTML properly or it could or it couldn't.

It was smart, but it was logic.

It was if-then statements.

Yes, that's for sure.

And we will have people not only when it comes to those older CMSs, we will also have people from the Joomla community, from Drupal community.

So, like...

Now we can kind of call them the old three, right? Because they are one of the oldest CMSs that are still on the market.

Oh, that's great.

Well, I was going to ask about that.

And it just sounds like a very diverse group of topics that, you know, of course, as you said, this is covering the whole landscape of CMS, not just WordPress, not just Astro, not just Joomla, which is great.

Like for someone who's coming to get in here for this conference, what do you hope they get out of the experience?

Yeah, it was very easily accessible at the time.

There really wasn't another CMS, you know, what we have Joomla and Drupal.

It's like those were, you know, Joomla, again, it's very contentious platform.

I never enjoyed it.

Drupal, kind of the same thing, but usually way too much for a brochure site.

You know, I think it's always, you know, a balance between hosting and how a website's been built.

Now, we've got emphasis here on WordPress, but there's other kind of self-hosted, like Joomla, Drupal, a load of others, and then you've got SaaS, haven't you? But when it comes to hosting, you know, hosting tends to be blamed, and sometimes it's justified.

But the other time, it's how the website's been configured.

have you got any insights about how agencies should deal with this um at all it's a big question though isn't it

Hmm.

In those scenarios, you are looking at robust database-driven systems like Joomla or Drupal.

And for true e-commerce, if you aren't using a WooCommerce plugin within WordPress, the industry standard shifts to hosted solutions like Shopify for speed and security-

Yeah

I got the idea to work a referral split with him.

He was building particular kinds of websites, Joomla websites.

And I was providing IT services.

I said, if you bring me clients, I'll give you a cutout of the deal and vice versa.