The Joomla! platform is ubiquitous on the web, and by many seen as the industry standard for content management. It is highly scalable, the design is adaptable, and it is very, very well supported throughout the open source community. The community has kept up with modules, components, and plug-ins to do just about anything that one would want to do with a web presence. A person could potentially design and implement a complex website using the various tools and tutorials available on the web today. Now, there is a huge learning curve even in just the idea of how a CMS such as Joomla! works. Without an expert knowledge in it's usage and modification, it can be a huge undertaking and become frustrating (even though Joomla! is far and wide easier to use than any of the other CMS systems offered). That's where we step in. Chepri is well versed in design for, customizing, and implementing Joomla!.

Okay - we agree that Joomla! is pretty awesome stuff. Now, what if you want to sell things on your website? Will Joomla!'s fast architecture and scalability help in this instance? Well, simply put, yes. Out of the box Joomla acts as a very nice eCommerce solution, when the proper add-ins are installed and configured to act as a store. There are modules for online shopping carts, payment gateways, and the like all geared around Joomla!, and a very solid store can be made using it.

Everyone who has ever ventured into setting up an online store has had one common thing in mind: They want to make money. Sometimes, in the pursuit of this endeavor, people actuallly succeed. They begin to want to offer additional products, they want to accept various forms of payment, they want to have a more professional image in the world market place. A small Joomla! store could perhaps over a period of time become an enormous Joomla! store. Some features that were not important to a small store become "can't live withouts" over night. So, what we like to call 'additional functionality' is in desperate need of being applied. These functions can be as easy as creating a simple report in the backend, or as site defining as a more robust shopping cart system. Each of these functions can be custom coded into Joomla! by a seasoned developer. The gist: Joomla! is a Content Management System first, and an eCommerce store second.


On the other hand, the other leading CMS out there, Magento, takes the exact opposite approach in it's framework, and is an eCommerce store first, and a Content Management System second. Just about any functionality that an online merchant would want is built into Magento from the get-go. Magento's feature set as far as an online store is staggering. A summarization of the feature set of the free Community version can be found here. In a Magento implementation, all of the big guns are built into the store function. The CMS for appearance and such is a subset of features added on to the Magento platform. Additionally, Magento's user community is quite strong like Joomla!'s, with plenty of add ons and support throughout the web.

A store built on Magento is ultimately scalable and can handle thousands of products, but is limited in the amount of content that is delivered to the consumer through the site. This store also has a full feature set of store-centric abilities. A Joomla! store is scalable to a certain degree to handle hundreds of products and can handle the delivery of content very, very well. The choice for our customers does not seem so cut and dry once these decisions have to be made.

It just so happens that in the endeavor of getting "the best of both worlds," we hit the target on the site we built for GearTechs. GearTechs is a local Columbus, Ohio company that offers audio and video equipment to churches and other praise based organizations. The site constructed for Dave Horn of GearTechs is a hybrid of Joomla! and Magento, gaining from the strengths of both platforms in a seamless, non-recognizable integration of the two CMS systems.

Check out his site to witness what happens when the rules change about what can be done with a CMS.