Is Joomla Hard to Learn?

While the absolute majority of our customers already have Joomla websites, some of them don’t even have a website and want us to create a website for them using Joomla, or have a website yet or they are using another CMS and they want us to move them to Joomla. These customers ask for Joomla because they have heard a lot of good things about it: how they can build beautiful websites themselves with no programming experience, and how they can benefit from the myriad of extensions that will add functionality and interactivity to their websites. All these “good things” about Joomla aside, the first question that our customers ask us is: “Is Joomla hard to learn?”

Like any other question, this particular question has multiple answers:

• If you are only going to update your articles (and not create new ones, in this case the sole purpose behind your Joomla website is to have an online presence), Joomla is somehow easy (you will need to learn how to login, how to locate your articles, how to upload media, how to link to the media from your articles, and how to save your articles).
• If you are going to add articles and play with the menus, then Joomla becomes of of medium difficulty.
• If you want to install and publish modules, components, and plugins, then Joomla becomes difficult.
• If you want to play with the templates, or use complicated components such as VirtueMart and JEvents (among others), then Joomla is really difficult.
• If you want to customize extensions (components, modules, and plugins) to suit your needs, then you won’t be able to do this by yourself, you will need to get help from a Joomla Expert.

We know that this post makes Joomla look intimidating, but that’s because it’s what it actually is! As programmers with at least 15 years of experience, sometimes it takes a day to identify the source of a problem that one of our clients is experiencing, that’s because Joomla is a very complicated product.

Now the question is, should you choose Joomla? Of course you should, there are many companies out there whose existence revolves around helping you if and when you run into a problem. Gone are the days where small sized companies are at the mercy of a programmer for updating their websites, now with Joomla they can do this themselves, and they can have full control of their websites. Is Joomla Hard? It can be! Can anyone maintain a Joomla website? Definitely!

Again, if you need help, you can always contact us, and we’ll be delighted to help you (and our fees are very reasonable).