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I used iJoomla for the first magazine I ever developed. I really liked it. It made Joomla work like it was made for magazines. But it has a lot of shortcomings. First of all, because Joomla is made for a bit more complex things than some blog platforms, it required that the person inputting articles let multiple parts of the site know about it—the taxonomy for articles is a bit overly complicated. But it was a great tool for my first magazine. And that’s who I recommend use this product—those trying to get their feet wet in a world of online magazines.

The problems with iJoomla and Joomla itself are that they make difficult a multiuser backend (which means that you—or someone like you—is going to be stuck uploading every single article…ouch!). It doesn’t allow you to display bylines on the frontpage very easily, so your users won’t know who wrote each article unless they click on it and go to the page itself. Immigrating to another CMS or even a blogging platform is difficult. Also, as Joomla doesn’t come with a good, functional commenting system, you have to find one that is to your liking should you think that a necessary part of running a magazine (don’t forget the SPAM filter). Finally, should you feel compelled to include a blog on your site, Joomla doesn’t allow for really nice integration. There are a few hacked options whereby you can install an instance of WordPress in your Joomla installation. But your subject to using whatever antiquated edition of WordPress comes along with the wrap-in.

What I like about iJoomla is that it’s ready out of the box. You load it into your Joomla installation and activate the bots, components, and other such pieces, and poof! you’re ready to go. It is also highly customizable if you know what you’re doing. For complex architectures Joomla is a nice framework that allows for easy breadcrumbing. It’s out of box SEO has been traditionally terrible, but that can be fixed with some tweaking. The best feature of iJoomla is it’s ability to display only the most recent volume and issue. That is a beautiful feature that I await on other platforms.

If you do use it, let me make a suggestion, do whatever you can to make your website look like it isn’t using iJoomla, or Joomla for that matter. I have encountered only one instance of a site that uses Joomla but doesn’t look like it does (although I don’t think it uses iJoomla). Then again, if a site has done it really well, I probably wouldn’t ever find out.

Below is a list of a few magazines using iJoomla. Look at what they’ve done:
UN Magazine—This site has a very Joomlavian (is that a word…it is now) flavor to it. It’s good looking, but it’s obvious they use iJoomla.

The Bridge Magazine—This is a pretty nice looking magazine page. Although there is tons of content on the frontpage, and it’s not organized really well. One problem with magazines, Slate Magazine’s homepage. It is organized by day, and it keeps you interested all the way down. They have tons of information packed into a tiny space and it makes me want to read it all.

The Catalyst—Their homepage is beautiful. I especially like their attractive header, although it’s a bit large IMHO. In their actual magazine section, however, it becomes obvious that they are using iJoomla. It’s pretty and all, but it just doesn’t cut it for me. If you notice, each article has a byline at the very end of their excerpt. But if you click on the article itself, usually the byline reads “The Staff” which probably means that they got perturbed too. Second, in the menu in the header, you can browse old issues. The menu is already a mile long. If this magazine survives another couple of years, their menu is going to be off the page.

Barkley and Paws has done a good job making their site look like a non-iJoomla site. Still, no byline, but the content is nicely organized, and each article has a pretty, accompanying picture.

HCJB—was one of the first iJoomla users. They were the reason I used it. I really like HCJB and I figured if they were using it, then it was good enough for me. They’ve done a lot of work over the years to make sure that their site doesn’t look like it’s using iJoomla. Frankly, I think they’ve done the best job of any site using iJoomla to do that.