Content Curation & Joomla - A Starter Guide
If looking to expand your library of content curation tools, Joomla is an option worth exploring. As a popular, award-winning tool, this content management system helps you to build robust websites and online applications. Used widely by organizations ranging from Harvard to IHOP, Joomla is a free tool that many use to create attractive and easy-to-manage sites.
In this article, we will cover where Joomla does well and where it falls short with regards to content curation along with a few paths forward to meet your curation needs.
Here are a few ways that Joomla can be used to help with content curation:
Robust Content Management
As a content management system, Joomla offers easy management of numerous types of content. Text, documents, pictures, music and video are some examples of content that you can display, track and store. The system enables you to easily organize and manage content. Its heavier duty than WordPress and more comparable to Drupal.
Display and Design Elements
The value of a nicely designed website or blog can’t be underestimated. People make quick, sometimes unconscious judgments about the appearance of a website. Your content may be top notch, but if the layout and design are lackluster, your site may not receive the repeat visitors that it should.
Joomla offers the flexibility of customizing the layout of your website or blog. If the content you are curating consists of photographs, for example, you’ll have numerous options for how to display them so that they’re most visually appealing on the page. The same goes for other types of content. With more design options, content like book reviews, product reviews and links to articles can be placed on the page in eye catching ways.
Organizing Your Content
Content consumption becomes enjoyable with Joomla because of the built-in organizational tools. Your readers can assign ratings to articles and/or email them to others. You can easily determine which articles are most popular and allow visitors to subscribe to new blog posts.
Components and Article Generation
Joomla also offers components allowing you to create new articles using keywords that pull content from feed sources that you select. You can set multiple configurations for each feed source. Each article is customizable, allowing you to choose specific categories and sections, set article expiration dates, delete images in the content, choose the number of keywords in the article and more. You could then review your new articles and write introductions or otherwise customize or organize the content using other content curation software.
Advanced Features
If your content curation project is more advanced, requiring data collection and reporting, Joomla has the framework to accommodate building data reporting tools. E-commerce systems, custom product catalogs, and reservation systems are a few more examples of Joomla’s advanced programming features available for website owners and developers.
Where Joomla doesn’t scale
If you are looking to curate hundreds of pieces of content, and need a editorial workflow within Joomla, particularly for a business, then you are out of luck. Currently Joomla does not offer that. Your best approach would be to use a content curation platform like Curata and pump content from there into Joomla using an API.
Whether you’re managing content for an e-commerce site, an online magazine, your church website or a family blog, Joomla allows you to get set up quickly and organize your content so that it gets noticed. Its advanced components and programming features allow you to create a site that is as basic or sophisticated as you need it to be, but it still has a long way to go with regards to having native content curation.
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