Here at Pople Web Design we follow the progress of the diffrent content management systems (CMS) very closely, recently Wordpress has been gaining a great number of valuable and robust features bringing it close to the impressive functionality of Joomla.
One of my favorit addons to wordpress is the auto insall updates tool which is something Joomla has been missing dearly, for many of its components and its core. But with the herald of Joomla 1.6 comming out of the dark my frets about if Joomla was keeping up with the competition have been calmed. Joomla 1.6 is a huge step towards better functionality, usability and design.
Having installed it and looked at some of the new code I am overjoyed to find that it fixes many of my current little niggles about how the Joomla CMS currently works. When comparing it to the competition I can see it simply blows it away, the sheer size of the extensions database provide such a wealth of functionality that no other CMS can come close too.
My must have components of 2009 have to be Virtuemart the outstanding shopping solution, SH404 the unbeatable SEO tool, and now Community Builder. Each big names in Joomla and because they provide such powefull expansions of the Core functionality.
If your looking at which CMS to chose, I cannot recomend Joomla enough, the progressions from 1.5 to 1.6 will be almost as amazing as the change from Joomla 1 to 1.5. I cant wait for a stable release, so that we can WOW our customers even more!
Big thanks to everyone at Joomla.