Is this a fork in the road?

Has the time come for me to head in a different direction and move on from Joomla in favour of a more modern CMS?

I've you know me, or have been reading my website, you'll know that I have been using Joomla as my CMS of choice since about 2008 - way back when Joomla was still in it's infancy. Since then I have built hundreds of websites using Joomla, I've connected heavily with the local Joomla community and I'm even a Certified Joomla Administrator - one of only a handful in Australia. But it might be time for a change!

Lately over at Mity we have been using a new (to us) CMS that I think is really going to change the way we do things, and what we can deliver to our clients. It's a CMS called Statamic, and you've probably never heard of it - but that's OK. Statamic is a CMS that many things going for it, but the stand out features are:

• Easy to manage - possibly the easiest CMS to author in that I've used

• Flexible development - the degree to which we can create content block/types is huge

• It's fast - it has amazing caching built in which makes it lightening fast.

I'll no doubt be writing more (specific) posts about Statamic so I'm not going to talk to much about it here, but stay tuned.

Why I think it's time to leave Joomla behind.

Joomla has always been the distant second place holder to WordPress, but that has never bothered me. I've always been about providing the right solution rather than using the most popular CMS, but to be blunt - Joomla has lost it's way.

The current stable version of Joomla is 3.9.27. Joomla 3.0.0 was released in September 2012. As you can see over the last 9 years there have been a lot of updates released, and some great new features, but 2012 was 9 years ago!

In March 2017 Joomla announced the retirement of version 3 and its plans for version 4, but here was are in June 2021 and still no Joomla 4. What have they been doing for the last 4 years? Lots of promises, and from the grapevine lots of internal arguing. Development has been slow, and it's almost out of date before it's been released.

As someone who has developed with Joomla for 13 years I can't see that Joomla 4 is going to do anything new or groundbreaking that's going to make my like, or the life of my clients, any easier - and when I say easier I'm talking about content authoring and giving flexibility (with structure) to how content is constructed.

Those people in the WordPress camp with talk about page builders, and they exist in Joomla too, but I hate them and have never used them. True website development (and design for that matter) isn't about giving your users a hundred different options for content creation, it's about designing flexible and reusable content blocks that bring beauty to a website while keeping the focus on content and just as important - on brand!

So moving forward I can see a lot more of my projects using Statamic - this new website for me is built on Statamic and its development was such a joy - even with the huge learning curve. Sure there will still be a place for Joomla, but not for every project.

Keep coming back and read about my Statamic journey and learn more about why it's the oasis on my horizon.