Find out how this web development innovation is changing the way websites are being built.

Here’s a parallel. Willowvale Mazda Motor industries in Harare does not build cars from scratch. They simply receive kits from the manufacturers and put the parts together to build a vehicle. Imagine being able to do that with a website- each time you build one, you don’t build it from scratch but simply take the parts you need out of a “box” and put them together.

Left: Wearing the same cap- Joomla is fast becoming a standard for Zimbabwean web developers

That’s what a content management system (CMS) can do for you and Zimbabwean web developers have fallen in love with one CMS in particular. It has a peculiar name, whose origins are African- Joomla!- with the exclamation mark.

Cyberplex Africa, Design@7, Venekera Works, Webdev and a slew of other design houses have rolled out sites using Joomla! in the last two to three years.

When Webdev, a Zimbabwean web design power house which originally did most of their sites using a scripting language called Cold Fusion, redesigned some of Zimbabwe’s biggest newspaper sites, The Independent and The Standard last year using Joomla! it sent a loud message home- Joomla! was here to stay. The Webdev move to Joomla! was a major one because Joomla! is written in a language called PHP which is a competitor to Cold Fusion.

Cyberplex Africa, the grand daddy of professional web design companies in Zimbabwe, used ASP (Active Server Pages), another PHP competitor for a lot of their original sites including the legendary portal allzimbabwe.com (now defunct). Many of their basic brochure sites were designed using HTML. But recently, Cyberplex Africa has started launching some Joomla! websites (Examples are www.nmbz.co.zw, www.zimrelief.info, www.starafricacorporation.com and www.nyaradzo.co.zw) adding their endorsement to the CMS.

Venekera Works, now owned by Celsys Limited, was also originally an HTML and ASP joint. In 2004, the company made a move to design all their new sites using content management systems. One of the CMS’s on their list was one called Mambo which later on gave birth to an offshoot project called Joomla! This is now a standard for most Venekera websites (See www.celsys.co.zw, www.team.co.zw, www.innov8motivation.com and www.enviroafrica.org).

Joomla! is not just the darling of  Zim web designers. The world over, it is eclipsing other content management systems as the preferred web development platform. There are no comprehensive statistics for the number of users worldwide but between March 2007 and June this year, the CMS was downloaded over five million times (PRLog.org).

To help you understand what all this Joomla! madness is about perhaps we should go back to a time- not so long ago- when web developers had to build every website from scratch. In those days you needed to know how to write a simple type of code called Hypertext Markup Language. With HTML, if you wanted a table or an image on your web page you had to know the code for creating a table or pulling an image which was easy enough if you took the time to learn the language.

Then came what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editors like Macromedia’s Dreamweaver and Microsoft’s Frontpage. These made creating web pages just as easy as creating a Microsoft Word document- for the most part. But you still had to create everything from scratch.

Then web developers started asking themselves: “What if we could automate the process of creating the most common parts of a website?” The answer to that question came in the form of content management systems, which, like IBM’s WebSphere, retailed for thousands of dollars.

The dawn of collaborative application development and the open source movement saw some CMS’s becoming available for free on the Internet. Today, there are thousands of them- including Joomla! which is rated among the most powerful. Yes, you heard me- Joomla! is free.

CMS’s have revolutionised the way web developers work. The focus is now on modifying the original installation to deliver a site that fits in with the clients needs rather than battling with code to simply create pages. One person on a design team can work on the site template while another works on the content and a third works on extra functionality like a mortgage calculator for instance. Then all these things can be plugged in together to work as one seamless website.

The advantages of Joomla! are that it is easy to set up, is secure, has a large online community,  is relatively easy to customise and has a learning curve that is anything but sharp.

So, if all these companies are using the same tools and applications, that can only mean that any competitive advantage will come from service levels and how well each company brands itself. It’s much the same scenario with how global PC manufactures like Dell, Toshiba, Acer and Compaq have their parts made in the same factories in Asia. The difference is in the service and the power of the brand that pushes it.

And just in case you were wondering about the African roots of the name Joomla!- it is from the Swahili word “jumla” meaning “all together” or “as a whole”.

Useful Links

:: Joomla! homepage
:: Joomla! on Wikipedia
:: Content Management Systems on Wikipedia