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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.
I think I should put it as the first point in my next post in this series. It was going to be further down the list but since it's the one thing everyone is talking about I guess it guarantees the out-of-sequence mention right upfront.
I can't get to Jen Kramer's original reporting but...
I doubt that this group was unbiased. I don't think you can find anybody that hasn't heard or doesn't believe the common wisdom that Wordpress is the easiest and best CMS, no matter how erroneous that statement is.
Community is a lousy marketing point. If there are benefits to community, those might be marketing points.
I've noticed that in the Wordpress community, there are many that are vociferously outspoken against Joomla. In the Joomla community, we tend to be more fair minded. Maybe we are too fair. Let's claim our strengths, which we have many.
Joomla has been awful at PR and evangelizing its strengths. Joomla has better technology that WP, and has for years. But how does that translate into benfits for corporations, organizations, web publishers, and web contributors?
About that focus group. Had they been shown the WP article submission screen, and a Joomla front end article submission screen, their 'ease of use' perceptions would be different.
Had they been asked to add metadescriptions to articles, and make sure that caching is working, then they would have had different perceptions.
Had they been asked to rearrange the presentation of the articles (list, blog, etc), change the postion of a module/widget, or make sure that an article expires and unpublishes at the end of the week, their perceptions would be different.
Had they been required to make a structured post type (CCK) their perception would be different.
Sure, it's a lot easier to fly a kite than it is to fly an airplane. Try hauling passengers coast to coast in a hang glider and you see how simple can get complicated and disastrous really quickly.
We have several markets.
Business owners and decision makers.
Site developers
Extension developers
Contributors / maintainers
The joomla.org web site needs to quickly get each of them to appropriate resources for making decisions and getting what information they need. Right now, joomla.org does a lousy job of advertising benefits in the header.
So, what does each market need most?
Write content. Joomla!'s screen is crowded. WordPress? When you start typing the first few words it automatically switches to a distraction free environment.
Paste a picture. In Joomla! you have to first go to the Media Manager. Upload. Go back to your article. Click on the correct media insertion button (because we have two, kill me now!). Find the image you uploaded. Does it look right? No? Delete, re-insert. WordPress: drag'n'drop.
Paste an embedded YouTube video or Tweet. No can do without 3PD plugins and clumsy plugin codes. WordPress: Go to YouTube, copy link, paste it in WordPress and magically it's embedded.
Link to other content. In Joomla! you have to use the correct button because somehow having two link buttons makes sense. In WordPress the unified link dialog guides you through.
All these can only be fixed if you install JCE. Granted, Joomla! + JCE beats WordPress any day of the week, as long as you don't mind Joomla!'s complicated menu creation process. How many first time users ever heard of JCE? This drives them away.
There are more things that everyone despises in Joomla!, even us developing it and with it. Give me about 3-4 hours and I'll publish a new post about that.
I would hate that. Didn't really care for all the tabs with the Bootstrap upgrade. I felt that made for more 'hunting' while earlier version had things like meta-descriptions and publication control right there. I understand that compromises needed to be made, but this is one of those changes that made Joomla backend imperfect for both desktop and tablet.
Paste a picture. In Joomla! you have to first go to the Media Manager. Upload. Go back to your article. Click on the correct media insertion button (because we have two, kill me now!). Find the image you uploaded. Does it look right? No? Delete, re-insert. WordPress: drag’n’drop.
I agree, but this doesn't affect me that much because I rely on jce editor. I understand that a new media manager is on the way. But hey, don't you work with multple tabs in your browser? Or multiple browser windows?
Adding articles to menu would be great without having to add a plugin.
Being able to get to a page using SEF url without having to add that page to a hidden menu would also be great.
So I must concede that there are some 'out of the box' usability issues with Joomla. There are 'out of the box' issues with WP & D too. We need to fix our issues, and champion our strengths to those that would benefit from them.
Joomla is still the most complete, secure, easily extendable, and technically advanced general purpose CMS.
What happens is users get frustrated by some aspect of the site that is not related to the platform - usually, it about lack of visitors, sales and leads. This is not a Joomla problem, this is a SEO and marketing issue.
Then, out of this frustration the user jumps to another platform and what happens is the process of re-building a site focuses or re-focuses the users attention on the issues that were causing the lack of sales.
It is not the new platform, it is thinking about the website again, re-structuring content, layout and many small things that will make the site better. But of course the new platform will be praised as being better than Joomla as result, rather than what really was the catalyst for re-evaluating their business.
I don't consider a tablet to be a productivity tool. It is a content consumption tool. So I don't see the point of making Joomla administration tablet friendly at the expense of traditional PC / MAC interface.
I tried to revert to the older administrator template (2.5 version) when Joomla first went to Bootstrap in administrator area. That broke things, so I couldn't do it.
All in all, though, it's way better than WP. I was baffled me for a while at how to add a custom html widget in WP. And I was astounded that there was no editor on that feature. That's one of the reasons why I contend that WP is not yet a complete CMS.
I never use myself as a use case anymore - you have to listen to your audience.
@Nicholas - So if you had whipped out an ipad at your dinner to fix a web site problem, that would have made the date go better?
Really, stop the nonsense. Some of these examples are just wishful thinking. I can't even read my email on my tablet in the daylight. I can barely dial my phone in the daylight. That speaks to bad design and inappropriate expectations of technology.
I barely use the web on my phone because 4g is so damn slow. My time is too important to waste it trying to administer a web site on a tablet or phone.
If I am within range of wifi, I'll use a netbook or chromebook, as they are cheap, ultra-portable, and more effective than a tablet.
But with Joomla, a content management system, we shouldn't be designing it to work in situations that are ridiculous. And that goes to your earlier point, Nicholas. Joomla can't be all things to all people. Certainly we shouldn't have the administrative back end pandering to edge cases.
As for 4G being so slow, you have to be ducking kidding me, right? Welcome to Greece. My "fast" ADSL in the office is 13Mbps download / 1Mbps upload. My home ADSL is 3.8Mbps down / 0.7MBps up. 3G in this area (we have no 4G where I live) is 11Mbps down / 5Mbps up. If I want to upload something fast I have to switch to 3G. When I'm visiting my mom's place where the ADSL barely syncs at 3Mbps and delivers far less I do switch to 4G which gives me a good 30+ Mbps download even on a bad day.
Do you realize that I'm doing what I'm doing with Internet speeds that you consider to be pretty much a stalled connection? When I started developing JoomlaPack in '06 all we had was dial-up 44.8Kbps. And the connection reset every time someone picked up the phone or bumped on the coffee table where one of the two sets was placed on. I was duct taping the receivers before connecting to the Internet... Until 2009 my Internet connection was 768Kbps down / 384Kbps up. That was "fast". Around 2009 I got an upgrade to 2Mbps/512Kbps. Yippee! That's what I used to start my business BTW, this dead bloody slow connection. Late 2010 I got an upgrade to a whooping 4Mbps/768Kbps and in 2011 it maxed out at 5Mbps/768Kbps. When I moved in 2012 I finally got a sync speed over 10Mbps for the first time in my life. VDSL is still in beta in this country and with nobody having any money to invest I guess it will remain forever. So I'm stuck with 13Mbps – unless it rains and my connection drops 2Mbps because the damned junction boxes on the phone poles were water proof 20 years ago when first installed, now not so much. And you have the nerve to tell me that 4G is SLOW? Meh...
Mobile is more important than you think it is. And you justifying differently is just a shocking statement.
Before the advent of the iPad I had to carry around a laptop with me wherever I went. Having an on-line business means that you may get an emergency (people can't pay, download broken, urgent support request, ...) anytime. A laptop and a 3G WiFi dongle + backup batteries were always in my bag which I always carried with me.
With the iPad I no longer had to do that. Back in Joomla! 1.x and 2.5 it was really damn hard to work in the backend. Everything I had to do required pinching, swiping and trying to remember where the hell I was on the page. With Joomla! 3 my experience is so much smoother. But not having to carry a laptop while knowing I'm not going to painfully regret it* has been liberating.
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[*] Back in 2010 crap hit the fan while I was having dinner with my girlfriend and I had no laptop with me. We had to break dinner short and rush to my home where I could fix the site. She was definitely NOT impressed. Nor was she impressed with her geek boyfriend carrying a laptop bag everywhere from that point onwards.
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I'm not convinced that Joomla needs to be responsive on the back end, and am certain that it has adversely affected efficiency.
But hey, a bad is a gas ( fad is a fad) so everyone has to do it, dam the consequences. Welcome to the flat age s.
Also, I firmly believe that Joomla! 3's back-end has made things simpler.
Joomla! 2.5: 9 fields at the top left of the page, a TINY editor area that's hidden below the fold(!!!), 5 very long sliders at the right hand page, scroll all the way to the bottom to find the scary-looking "Article permissions". This page screams "BORDER CONTROL. HAVE YOUR PAPERS READY. VIOLATORS WILL BE EXECUTED." It certainly doesn't invite me to write content in the 10-line-high, narrow editor area.
Joomla! 3: Two fields at the top, title and alias. A HUGE content area right on my face, inviting me to write profuse amounts of content. Basic controls on my right. Oh, and the sliders have now become much easier to access tabs above the editor area. Even better, the super ultra long slider content is now presented in two columns, requiring me to scroll less.
Question for small business companies for Joomla to answer: why should I bother to set up Joomla as a publishing web system when I can create my own web site in 5 minutes for free 30 days and then pay 29 USD per quarter?
One example: http://www.n.nu/ etc
50.000 Joomla customers disappeared..? and analysis...
And please do read the article and the message at the end. Medium to high complexity site. Not a 4 page brochure site. There's no compelling reason to use Joomla! for a brochure site instead of a hosted service. If nothing else, just the hosting of the site is more expensive than the hosted service, let alone the time you need to learn how to do basic administration.
You know what you're asking me? "CAT should answer to people why would someone buy their excavators to move around in the city twice a month instead of a renting a Smart car." I'm pretty sure CAT won't be making any city-friendly excavators which can't dig a hole and have the efficiency of a Smart car. Because they're building excavators, not city vehicles.