Over the last year I've collected my thoughts on Joomla! the CMS, the project and the community. We've finally all come to the conclusion that Joomla! needs a revamp. The time is ripe to discuss the future. This is a very big subject so I'm going to present this as a series of blog posts. In this first installment we'll talk about Joomla!'s target audience and a unified marketing message to frame our vision.

Before revamping a software product we need to identify the target audience. Who's using it and why? Who do we want to use it and is it really possible? Is the product resonating with the target audience or do we need to change it? In other words we need to identify the target audience and create a unified marketing message.

The best place to start is a focus group. A collection of unbiased outsiders who will test drive our product and give us constructive feedback. This effectively happened last week at Harvard Extension as reported by the instructor, Jen Kramer. The students were not impressed with the balance between the learning curve and the control exerted over the outcome. But the more scathing feedback is this:

Finally, many commented on how much they disliked the community. The community, they concluded, focused too much on the commercial realm. Everything was about making money. There were too many extensions that were paid. There were too many people out for themselves, especially those in positions of leadership.

This hurts. They are telling us that the "something for everyone" marketing message has landed flat on its face. The product is not simple enough for casual users and not good enough for enterprise settings. This makes the –inevitable and in par with competitors'– commercialization look like a thinly veiled attempt in monetizing a bad product.

This feedback makes me think who Joomla! is targeting. It's clearly not the casual user who wants to get something published on the web, fast. These people have no need for the powerful features, they just want to get things done easily. They will choose a self-hosted WordPress site for the perceived simplicity. The irony of writing these words in WordPress' very efficient "focus mode" on my blog doesn't go unnoticed by yours truly. Let's also not forget that the majority of these people are not even CMS users: they are creating content on social media. Casual users crave for the "do not make me thing" approach of WordPress, hosted blogging services and social media.

The barrier to content creation on these platforms is non-existent. You can't compete with that.

Does Joomla! appeal to the enterprise / commercial sector? No and it's not just because a random collection of people at Harvard Extended said so. Joomla! doesn't have a cat's chance in hell of competing with the behemoths that Automattic (WordPress) and Acquia (Drupal) currently are. Just today we've read that Automattic bought WooCommerce, currently the most popular e-commerce software on the Internet.

Chew on that for a minute. WooCommerce is more popular than Magento, a product backed by the 400-pound gorilla called PayPal. WordPress has become a de facto e-commerce behemoth. It should be quite clear that Joomla! doesn't have any realistic chance of competing in that sector.

What about bespoke sites? Does Joomla! appeal to that? Hardly so, I'm afraid. This niche is dominated on one hand by Drupal and on the other hand by established PHP frameworks such as Laravel, Zend Framework and Symfony.

While we were consumed in introversion over leadership structure these rivals have developed a massive corpus of readily available solutions to problems we haven't even imagined.

Not to mention that the overall PHP community has a very negative view for Joomla!. Granted, they still remember Joomla! as it was in 1.0 and even 1.5, i.e. not the compelling development paradigm. But even today, Joomla! 3 is archaic by modern standards.

I can hardly imagine any corporate developer on their right mind messing with JTable and JModelLegacy instead of using Laravel.

This leaves us in the valley smack in the middle of simplicity and enterprise. Historically this was exactly Joomla!'s position as attested by countless comparisons of the "big three" (WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal) and the overall sentiment among the majority of users and developers. Granted, some of you do know of people using Joomla! for simple blogs and complex enterprise sites but these are the exceptions validating the rule.

Let's refocus. How can we market Joomla! to people? Why should they use Joomla! instead of anything else?

Looking for inspiration I stumbled on the blog of Tower, the most popular Git GUI client for Mac OS X. These very smart people, who are not web developers, decided to build their own blogging application. Why? In their words: Using the most popular web software on the planet also means you're using one of the most popular hacking targets.

We've solved this problem years ago and not just because we're the second most popular CMS. Joomla! is one of the most secure CMS out there right out of the box. And it's outright simple to make it airtight.

Marketing point: Joomla! is secure

The other important thing about Joomla! is that it's cheaper than its competition when it comes to medium to high complexity websites. WordPress is fine for simple sites but if you want to integrate several advanced features, such as an e-commerce platform, it gets very complicated very fast. This is sort of the point behind Automattic buying WooCommerce, make no mistake about it. Drupal, on the other hand, requires you to write code or install dozens of modules for doing pretty much anything useful. Obviously PHP frameworks require you to write code for everything.

Joomla!, on the other hand can do a lot of very powerful things by just installing and configuring off-the-shelf extensions. The immediate advantage is that a small team, or even an individual, can create a complex solution which would require a significantly larger team and a proportionally higher budget with any other competitive solution.

Marketing point: Joomla! can be used by small shops for building medium to high complexity sites on a budget, using off-the-shelf software components.

Finally, we need to take a look at the identity of the competition. Even though both WordPress and Drupal are nominally community projects they are dominated by for-profit corporations (Automattic and Acquia) which exert indirect but strong control over the product. If nothing else, the CEOs of these two companies are the figure-heads of the respective product. In Drupal they even have a special term: benevolent dictator for life.

Joomla! is, was and hopefully will continue to be a "hippy" product. There is no figurehead. There is no corporate overlord. Joomla!'s core value is the embrace of openness and equality. When the other projects have based their structure on a dictatorship (benevolence of the dictator notwithstanding) Joomla! is –at least nominally– an open, grassroots project.

Marketing point: Joomla! is an open product, developed by and for the community.

TL;DR – The bottom line

Combining all these marketing points you can come up with a powerful, unified marketing message which frames our vision for Joomla! and resonates deeply with its user base.

Joomla! is an open product, developed by and for the community. It is used by end users, site integrators and SMEs to build medium to high complexity, very secure websites on a budget, using off-the-shelf software components they can install, configure and integrate themselves without prior experience with the system or requiring knowledge of PHP, HTML and CSS.

Let's stop claiming that Joomla! is something for everyone. In the wise words of Sir Max Beerbohm "Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best." We don't want a mediocre product which is equally bad for everyone – remember that this was the conclusion of our focus group for the current product. We need to simplify the marketing message and make our vision laser-focused. Remember the tagline of Joomla!'s predecessor Mambo? "Power in simplicity". It's time to reclaim our legacy.

To be continued: Joomla! 4 and Beyond: A vision for the end user.

68 comments

      • Sounds like we (as in you and me and a few other pro-change people) need to form an independent focus group ourselves :)

  • why don't we leave Joomla & its brand for a second & think about the people & the problem.
    i think we should create a CMS for contents, not contents for CMS.
    what about node base ui CMS where things can be created like a flow chart.
    why we always think about website instead of information & content
    why should we create a CMS for website why not for smart information cards (for mobile) , like small piece of content with some functionality , intelligent & some call of action that's it.
    what about small smart chunk of information
    what about a CMS , just using google doc or other platefrom api


    *i think website are bullshit its time for smart chunk of information
    • Hemant, if you think that "website are bullshit its time for smart chunk of information" then you should not be using Joomla! or WordPress or Drupal or... The simple reason being that all of these are website creation systems. There are also issues regarding discoverability of content and so on but I don't want to burst your bubble. If you truly believe that the future lies in disorganised content which will magically be made available and people will want to consume you're free to try that with your own non-site. Let us all others work towards building sites which use snippets of information, presented in any format (be it "cards" or "push messages" or whatever have you), as supplemental tools to aid in conversion.
  • Spot on overall. Just one question to Andrew and Nic.. You say Joomla is not for enterprise .. Can you ellaboratr.. Maybe tell 10 things that make it unfit for enterprise ?
    • The main selling point for Joomla in the Enterprise is the easy with which you can install many extensions and get a site doing something.

      But any developer who has done that knows it is a nightmare. It's not the core, it's what you add to the core. So with that in mind, here's the enterprise level problems:


      Extension developers do their own thing TOO much (no, I'd don't want to install F0F and Nooku and X and Y and Z just to make my site work).
      Developers override core functionality the wrong way (I'm looking at you Warp).
      Developers don't follow the Joomla Way of doing things.
      Developers don't follow SOLID principles (just S - Single Responsibility Principle - would be something).
      Developers don't think about how their extension will scale for sites with tens of thousands of users or items of content.
      Developers don't profile their database queries when sites get really large.
      Developers use system plugins to workaround problems where they should be using libraries.
      Some extensions try to play nice with others, most don't.


      For Joomla itself.
      9. Some plugins simply don't make sense (there's a case where a user or auth plugin doesn't have access to the user id - seriously?)
      10. The menu-module system is just a constant battle to convince Joomla it's on the page you want it to be on.
      11. The entire Joomla codebase is in desperate need of reform.

      This can be summarised by saying there is insufficient synergy within the extension community, and insufficient product management from the core leadership (oh there are reasons why that is so, but that doesn't matter).

      Enterprise is looking for reliability and productivity and return on investment. Joomla doesn't deliver because enterprise doesn't make a distinction between the core product and developer extensions. It's all the same to them.
      • I disagree that Joomla! by and large would be benefitted by forcing The Joomla! Way and SOLID down the throats of everyone. Not to mention that the rate and depth of change is so randomly allocated that makes it impossible for any developer to have a product strategy, let alone a business strategy. Take this from someone who was doing things The Joomla! Way from 2006 to 2012 and spent many sleepless nights trying to work around unnecessary, undocumented core changes. Why do you think Nooku and FOF were written?

        I do agree that if you want to build an enterprise application you need to do the exact opposite of what Joomla! is doing. Then again, you need to do the exact opposite of what WP and Drupal is using. Is it any wonder enterprise users use PHP frameworks (or even NOT PHP at all) instead of any FOSS CMS? Not really.

        The Joomla! Framework could be targeting enterprise applications. I just don't think that carrying the Joomla! brand is a good thing in this pursuit. This is what I was saying a year ago. I do see the need for JFW I just don't think its name serves either Joomla! or the FW itself. It's a bit like the Apple printers of mid-1990s: they devalued the Apple brand and nobody would take them seriously (even though they were actually very good, reputable but rebranded printers!).
        • Damn, we were on such a good roll :)

          I'd love developers to embrace SOLID because it's a better plan than "I make things up as I go" :) What I mean is I've seen so much core where developers are trying to shovel too many responsibilities into a single method (oh, like let's have one function does 20 things, and then lets send an email at the end for good measure). Guys, you are making it really hard for me to fix the bit in the middle that's not working.

          Yes, yes, Joomla 1.5 should have been 2 and 1.6 should be been 3 - I know, I know. But I am seeing devs doing crazy things with overriding overrides and they end up completely corrupting the original idea (end result is I can't fix a problem because they changed the way overrides behaved). So for that example, respecting the "Joomla Way" is extremely important.
          • Andrew, I don't disagree with you on principle. I only disagree in practice. I do understand that supermegamodels with supermegamethods should be going the dodo way. This led me to do things like this as a first refactoring pass: https://github.com/akeeba/akeebasubs/tree/development/component/frontend/Model/Subscribe The thing is that refactoring just this one (admittedly insanely badly written over 4 years) Model takes one developer a week. Refactoring the entire Joomla! codebase AND testing it to make sure nothing broke would take far more than we can afford :( Clean code is a laudable goal but we need to ship a product before we completely become irrelevant.

            Regarding overrides and stuff, I agree with you. When I wrote FOF I decided to stick to the Joomla! Way. I did add media overrides and it was so successful it got imitated in the core. That's the sincerest form of flattery :) I disliked JLayout –even though it's a good idea on principle– because it's adding one parallel universe of overrides, leading to cognitive overload. Why not use the same override locations as the rest of the CMS and fall back to the "system" template when no override is found is beyond me.

            So, some things are practical to fix (JLayout) some are impractical (core Models). Would I love everything have small, testable methods doing one thing and one thing only? Yes. Do I think it'll happen with Joomla! in this lifetime? Probably not. Maybe a small core could be cleanly refactored but there are so many layers of cruft we most likely just don't have the time and warm bodies to clean them up.
  • This is in many ways in a direct continutation of the Work in the SWOT Team and in the WHY Team and in the LT Team working on this after JAB14.

    Point by point is found in these teams Works in the last years time and there is a broad concensus forming we should Work in this direction.

    However i, and others, raised one important point i think that is missed a Little here.

    Let me use the "vision" as the example:

    "Joomla! is an open product, developed by and for the community. It is used by end users, site integrators and SMEs to build medium to high complexity, very secure websites on a budget, using off-the-shelf software components they can install, configure and integrate themselves without prior experience with the system or requiring knowledge of PHP, HTML and CSS."

    If you split our users into 2 primary Groups.

    1) Those that are working with Building websites
    2) Those that are working in Companies or organizations that needs a website

    Its quite clear that if you are from Group 1 - the "vision" (or the why) is pretty clear and mentiones community, integrators etc. - its still a Little muddy if you ask me.

    Now lets focus on Group 2 - the "vision" is gone.
    Its a non marketable message.
    If i send that to a potential client they will not chose us as its not clear enough.

    So whats the problem?

    The community is not the product - the product is not the community.

    Our community does actually have a super clear why - our community is actually quite broad and can be even broader and i think the why for being in the community in many ways is very clear - just look at our conferences like JAB or JWC.

    But where we substantially lack a marketable message is to the endusers - not the users.

    So we need something thats marketable enough for the endusers to be communicated out and to be the primary focus.

    I dont even think we need a total new joomla 4.0+ to make this happen - to be honest then while we build j2.5 and j3 and made a Whole new level and layers of code and where extremely code focused - Wordpress did NOTHING and still won the market in the bottom. The only thing WP actually did was promise you could always update (which is easy when your code is 8 years old).

    So with NO better code they won the market - is a conclusion where we yet Again focus only on code a right direction and a right vision?

    I dont think so.

    We need to identify the segments we want to target - agreed.
    We need to identify the NEEDS of those segments we target.
    We need to develop the FEATURES that forfull those NEEDS of the segments we target.
    There needs to be a direct relation between the WHY, what you CODE and WHO your users are.

    It does not per say mean that we have to completely rewrite all code to get there - on the contrary.

    Some quick ideas that is in the Works or could be, could very well be very targeted:

    New Media Manager (that actually looks like its from this decade) is in Progress. (Lowend + Midend + Highend)
    Webservices is in Progress (in part found in redCORE right now) (Midend + Highend)
    New template built for Endusers and not for users (I have a project running here that we recently presented to Pete Bui in the Accessability WG to continue Work with) (Lowend + Midend + Highend)
    (Frontend) Content Creation Wizard - Makes it easier to create content + module + menu item etc (Lowend + Midend + Highend)
    More secure codebase / Security layer to compensate (admintools is a good example) (Lowend + Midend + Highend)
    Etc.

    The point is we need to make sure that there is a relation between what we do, the roadmap we have and the segments we target.

    I would claim that for 10 years we just coded based on ideas and inputs etc. but it was not part of a structured, organized effort to forfil some needs of our userbases - and if you look at the current Roadmap its perhaps longer reaching and clearer than ever - but still just focused on small feature parts with no bigger plan or vision.

    In the Why Team there is currently focus on a few different segments:
    Agencies (Web/Design/Advertising) - This is where WP is actually used and the base of their success (Why is that and what features are needed to get those to use Joomla instead).
    End Users (Working in Cooperations, Organizations etc) - This is where WP is found to be easier to learn and understand why is this? and how do we change that.
    Enterprise - The big market - Joomla actually does this very good - and Drupal has nothing on Joomla when it comes to that, Drupal has a more suppliers that are big and Joomla more 1-2 person suppliers - why is that? and what can be done to get Joomla to be more attractive to the bigger agencies etc. that does this.

    So i agree Security is a BIG market disruption compared to what WP does right now - it could and would rock the board.
    Security would also high both lowend, midend and highend market parts.

    I am not sure i entirely agree the middle market is the right place to compete or to make disruption - because the lowend has extended up to almost the middle - and the enterprise has also extended downwards also almost into the middle - so in reality the middle market is very small today as its heavily competed by both the top and buttom of the market.

    So i think we need to make it Simpler, we need to make it Smarter, we need to make it Quicker, we need to make it for Someone.

    So to define a WHY you should always define a WHO you are that WHY to - and for us i think its important that we do not mix our community why with out product why - its 2 different Things and 99% of our end users doesnt care that we are community driven - so it needs to be a lot more spot on to the actual users asking themselfes "Whats in it for me" when they assess which CMS to use.

    I would like to also share the design work we did sofar to try and identify a new administrator template that was focused on things that is relevant to an end users and not a site integrator:

    www.redweb.dk/ronni/joomlabackendtemplate.zip

    Its around 3mb and png files zipped - there is some select views on desktop, tablet and mobile - as you can see its usercentric so admin views are based on what a end user would need Joomla for.

    We do have a html mockup of most of it too and i would like to put this into a new team (that works with the accessability team) that could Work on making this happen - i personally think that this is where the users truely meet the CMS for the first time and go "ohhh this looks hmm complex" and where we currently Loose the first battle vs. WP - and we shoulndt.

    I hope to talk more on this at JAB and lets make something happen!
  • I will give you an C- on your comment because you didn't even read the top and bottom where I clearly say that THIS IS THE FIRST PART of the series :p The next posts which I'll be publishing throughout the week have to do with:
    * Features for end users (which is what your comment is about)
    * Features for designers
    * Features for developers
    * Overall services provided (because these are too part of our product)

    Also I want to remind you that Joomla!'s clients are those who are building websites, no matter where they work for. See the message I wrote, it talks about "end users, site integrators and SMEs". SME means Small to Medium Enterprise which is a tautology to "companies or organizations". So, really, I'm not saying anything different.

    Let me say this again. This first post is NOT the vision. It's just about answering the question of "how do we want to frame our vision?" You clearly need a different vision if you're trying to cater for the casual don't-wanna-think user (dominated by WordPress) or the hardcore Corporate Behemoth developer (for the reasons Andrew clarified much better than yours truly). Now that I've established that we're targeting "end users, site integrators and SMEs" I can deploy my vision. You just have to wait. Writing these long posts and keep working on my day job is hard enough without having to prove I'm not an elephant all the time :D
    • Actually i used "vision" because i coulndt find a metter way to describe it - i had hoped the " " signaled that but i can see it could be misunderstood.

      My main point was to differentiate between an inner and an external vision - and to set focus on the difference of what fuels our community and what is a product strategy thats tied to end users needs.

      Did you try and download the design proposal for a new Joomla Administration template? :)
      • Ah, now I understand what you mean. Vision is the overall concept we have as an organisation to move forward. The other thing you put in quotes is our targeted marketing messages, our user stories. Yes, of course, these are two different things. The unified marketing message is the foundation on which the user stories are based. The vision is the foundation of our product.

        As for the template, sorry, I forgot to comment. I do like the flat look. I'm sure that 50% of our users will love it and the other 50% will hate it, because people... Seriously, I think it's a GREAT presentation. It follows the current design trends, it helps me locate information, it's uncluttered, I love it. However! I am more interested in how these graphics translate to CSS, namely a solid CSS framework or CSS abstraction layer. For all I know your graphics can be rendered with a skinned version of Bootstrap 2, Bootstrap 3, jQuery UI and so on and so forth. You'll have to wait for part 3 of this series to get into the details for designers. Please don't comment just yet.

        There are SO MANY topics we all need to discuss about Joomla! 4 and beyond. I only touched the first 15% or thereabouts in this post. You'll have to be patient for another 2-5 days until I get the chance to cover all the other topics you are touching. You don't really want me to post a 6,000 word braindump that will completely bog your mind, right? :p
        • Actually 6000 word brain dump posts are ok with me ;)

          The end-user centric admin template design was an intern project that ran here as part of an exam project for a digital designer.

          She worked on for 3 months and we mentored in her (Mary) in the process - and she got an A at the exam ;)

          I would hope that we can set down a subteam somewhere to hopefully take the outputs of this into creating a better End User experience - and hopefully we can then make sure its done with the right code quality and technology behind it :)

          Looking forward to the next post.
  • Hi Nikos,

    I think its good that this blog post analysis comes from someone that deeply know Joomla technically but also understand generally software development, have long term business experience, understand the CMS market condition(s) and get insights into whats matters = the potential target customers of Joomla world wide and what t h e y want! Code is fun but it doesnt have any value if nobody use it.

    The code and trademarks or whatever will be obsolete and vanish slowly if Joomla and its people not try harder, smarter to do the right things to meet up with today and future competition conditions where Joomla compete against let it be Wordpress, Drupal,...., cloud blogs, cloud CMSs, Google SSO systems or whatever that can make people ignore Joomla.

    Thinking..

    Who are we targeting and how do we market to that market(s) ( people) ?

    What do we want to achieve and how do we measure our progress? How can we do that?

    How do our marketing web site, www.joomla.org, target different users?
    Decisions makers, tech developers, end users of websystems (bloggers), Uni students (future users/developers/ambassadors for Joomla..) etc and where is the focus and importance?

    Make a rank of how much our web site Joomla.org fulfill these different target groups information/marketing needs. Analyze how much of our site 100% have different information/marketing to different groups and rethink, refocus of what information that is needed for people that.

    Decisions makers
    Tech developers
    Uni students
    End users
    .....

    If our information is 80% focused of information on tech developers (new Joomla version 1,2,3 shown etc etc) on our main site maybe that need only to be 20%. If our information/marketing is only 1% to uni students that maybe should be raised to 10%. If our information/marketing is only 4% target to decision makers then this figures should be 50-60%! If our information to target group end users of Joomla is only 2% maybe that have to be 20% etc.

    So define, analyze, set the direction on what Joomla stands for and how we target/marketing that to different important target groups.

    Love Joomla! bcs we are a group of volunteers that want to change the world!
    • @ssnoben Consolidating the gazillion sites will be part 4 or 5 of this series of posts. As for the marketing message to each market segment, do you really appeal to all those markets? Hardly. Bloggers are not in your target audience. Decision makers are not either because they decide based on business needs, not marketing hoopla. If all they have is WP devs or Laravel devs they won't choose Joomla! because it's expensive. This means we have to make sure that there many J! devs / integrators available. So here's your core target audience. University students are of course part of your target audience because, as you said, they will be the future devs / integrators. Miss them and you're on the track to extinction.

      @sakis You guys need to stop confusing branding with marketing. Everyone and their dog knows WordPress because Automattic is a public company. Same with Drupal/Acquia. Joomla! is NOT a corporate product. This is our strength, this is what we need to market. But most importantly we need a GOOD PRODUCT. We're trying to be all things to all men. This is impossible unless you want to suck equally for everybody. We need to fix that. Then we can market a GOOD product to more people. Simply put, the product we have right now is not good enough to market efficiently.
  • I agree about a more specific target group and a message. But this is not enough.

    Wordpress has a very strong brand name and is really hard to compete it, even if you change your message and your code's arhcitecture. This is the known solution by the "Do it fast" user and also the most popular cms for non-tech guys.

    Joomla! needs a more aggressive marketing strategy. More effective ways to attract users. Needs to raise awareness outside the Joomla! world.
    Such strategies are almost non-existent now
  • Nikos,

    I just want to do a comment on something I didnt read before post here.

    "Also I want to remind you that Joomla!’s clients are those who are building websites, no matter where they work for."

    I dont agree with your perception here and the people that build web site will never come close to do anything with Joomla i f the decision makers are not happy and have confident with Joomla.

    The people that building web sites are are not the clients, they are the web site builders. Thats step 2 after a decision is taken..
    • No. What you describe is step 4. Step 1: we need a site, make a call for offers. Step 2 integrators submit their offers and make their pitch. Step 3 an offer is selected and contract is signed. Step 4 the site is built. You assume that step 1 stipulates the CMS. It mostly doesn't unless there is a specific need (the person running the project is only familiar with a particular technology or his IT department only has people with specific skills). It' she integrators job to convince the client and our job to make the integrator's life easier by providing a good product and the material he needs to convince his client. We need example cases and comparisons and graphs. E cannot currently have them because our product is not good enough.
      • hmm ok not my experience Nic.

        "No. What you describe is step 4. Step 1: we need a site, make a call for offers."

        That was the situation in the 90ies when I doing sites for people in html code and there were 14.4kb modems :) Though I had a leased line 320kb since 1995 my self.

        Today small and medium sized companies, organizations doesn't "need" a site. They already have one and they have experience of what people complain about or like. If you have a terrible Media Manager today - you are out!

        And that is important input if you should change or keep what you have. If people are used to blog private in Wordpress and like it why change it in the company? Thats about productivity measures that top level mgt understand and listening to.

        So before they call the integrator, 9 out of 10 times, people have already decided what publishing CMS you prefer to use and thats how it will be. If you are a specialized Joomla integrator and dont understand why you not get any calls - thats why you dont do any Wordpress, Drupal integrations. The decision is already made. If you try to convince them of Joomla instead you have trouble..

        So they, formal and informal decision makers, will also decide to change or keep the existing web publishing system they already have thats my experience. Even companies I have been working with changed from Joomla to Wordpress just bcs top management want to have an "easier" publishing platform that they have "heard" is "easier", "quicker" and "better" etc than Joomla.

        People now know about Facebook interface and how to publish content, maybe have a blog (Blogger) or use Wordpress format for part of the companies web system and they are influencing how content should be used, communicated, published and written.

        Facebook test every new change and feature 3 months before they make it live to the Facebook community - how many end users test do we do for our community when we introduce new features? Not technical tests... What people need ask want from famouse Media Manager just to mention one...

        We can learn a lot from what Facebook and others doing and focus where Joomla have most complains and fix that. And this is about understand what priority of function UX is and not about code...
  • Thanks Nicholas for this great post. As working both with Joomla! and Wordpress as site builder and trainer for users-administrators (mainly SMEs), I noticed (but of course, I guess it's something well known) that the most difficult part to Joomla!'s acceptability is its media manager. Nowadays, people are used on social networks to post very simply images, videos, documents just uploading from hard drive or sharing a link. Quite complicated to explain that you first have to upload it on media manager, then to choose the right media in article by 'Insert image' at the bottom of text editor, and not with 'image' button of text editor, furthermore with very poor image settings available. Or to type {youtube}codeofthevideo{/youtube} to actually see video (this one is not even an in-house Joomla! functionality). Same 'illogical' stuff to link part of a text to another article. Of course, there are many very good third party extensions (text editors, media managers, ...) to achieve it more easely, but out of the box media management is hugely responsible of the image of non-user-friendly Joomla!.