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I believe that Joomla is the best open source content management system out there today. It's powerful but adaptable. You don't need to know PHP to use it and accomplish amazing things with it. If you do know PHP, you can do just about anything with it. It's been downloaded over 15 million times.

But as Bill Tomczak says, there used to be two TV recording formats: Beta and VHS. Everyone knew Beta was "better". But VHS eventually won the day.

"Holy Wars" have always been with us in the tech world. Emacs vs. vi, Mac vs. Windows, WordPerfect vs. MS Word -- you name it, there's a battle. And you could argue that there's another big battle looming out there, a three-way battle: Wordpress vs. Drupal vs. Joomla.

Want to start a "Holy War" out there today? Innocently post the question, "Which is better, Drupal, Joomla, or Wordpress?" At this point, it's troll bait.

But of those three, there's a really big battle going on between Drupal and Joomla. Most conventional wisdom in the open source community will agree that Wordpress wins hands-down when it comes to blogging or setting up a small, simple site. As sites grow in complexity, though, conventional wisdom points to Drupal or Joomla as the "right" solution to the problem.

Now, I'm incredibly biased toward Joomla. And I really love Joomla and its community. That's why I need to speak out when things are going badly.

And they're going really, really badly right now.

Open Source Matters, the organization that provides legal and financial support for the Joomla project, has hired a PR firm for Joomla. As stated in the post on the Joomla website, VOXUS is supposed to help evangelize Joomla, raising awareness about what Joomla is, what it does, and why it should be adopted.

Joomla desperately needs to do more of what Drupal is doing. Drupal started lobbying the US government, colleges and universities, and other venues long ago about its virtues. They scored a big win when the White House adopted Drupal as its platform. Joomla has never done any of this. Of course, Joomla's project is constructed differently than Drupal's. Our decentralized approach means that efforts like lobbying are not possible on a coordinated basis. We have individuals lobbying, but no big organizational support behind them, unlike Drupal.

As a result of no lobbying or marketing, Joomla's perception is not what it should be. Joomla is "not as powerful" as Drupal. Joomla is fine for freelancers and smaller sites, but if you need real power, you need to look at Drupal. Because Joomla doesn't have ACL in its core, it's lacking for more than one person managing a site. If you want to build a serious site, you really need to build it with Drupal.

Now, I don't believe anything in that above paragraph. Joomla's framework makes it more powerful and adaptable than Drupal -- once you know Joomla's framework.

MVC is a marvelous way to build extensions. As a designer, I only care about the V in MVC, and I love that I can make extensions look the way I need for them to look, without knowing a ton of PHP. I love that Bill can work on M and C all day long without breaking what I'm doing, and I don't break his M and C.

ACL is certainly a problem, but it's being addressed in 1.6 for the core, and it's available as several extensions right now for 1.5.

Watch Drupalistas work on Joomla -- they hack the core all day long, killing piles of kittens in the process. They don't take the time to learn The Joomla Way. If they did, they'd stick with Joomla.

Maybe a PR firm would do something great for Joomla then. Maybe they can start talking up Joomla. (Maybe they could start with a site redesign and adopt Joomla for the platform for their own website!) Unfortunately, what is that PR firm selling right now? Joomla 1.5. Which has problems.

As we all know, OSM doesn't have a lot of money. The money they do have, historically, we know they've spent defending Joomla's trademark and brand.

However, just recently, OSM started paying two highly qualified developers one day a week to work on Joomla 1.6. I was so thrilled to hear that, since the beta of Joomla 1.6 was due out in August 2009, and the project is so far behind schedule.  Paying a team of people to work on the next version makes sense. If we could get a functional beta out there, it would do a ton to boost the mood of the Joomla community and improve our standing and perception in the open source community at large. Some of us are indeed feeling competition with Drupal, and we'd like to be on the winning side of this argument.

As I've argued above, the PR firm might not be such a bad idea overall. But unfortunately, the way it was done and why it was done is the sticking point.

First of all, with limited financial resources, why is OSM not paying more for developers to finish the 1.6 project? Once 1.6 is released (or at least to release candidate state), then hire the PR firm -- that makes sense, to roll out the marketing as 1.6 comes out.

Second, I would like to know more about why this firm was picked over others. I want to know if PR firms within the Joomla community were asked to bid on this job, since the PR firm chosen is clearly not within the Joomla community.

Third, I'd like to know what exactly this PR firm will be doing. Will they talk to key developers and people within the Joomla community? Will they simply send out a bunch of press releases? How do they plan to come up to speed to talk about Joomla on a managerial level as well as a technical level? Will they get to help redesign the Joomla.org website, which is desperately needed?

Fourth, what is the PR firm doing to communicate WITHIN the Joomla community? Communications within the community are so fragmented, it's impossible to figure out what's going on. There's Google Groups, Twitter, Skype, ICQ, the Joomla forums, several Joomla blogs on the Joomla site, and much more. Unless you read all of them, you don't know what's going on. If this PR firm promises to consolidate those communications and put the big issues all in one place, where we can follow the 30,000 foot view of what's up with Joomla and 1.6, that would be a huge improvement.

Finally, and perhaps this is the biggest point -- How do we teach the Joomla leadership that criticism isn't random negativity, that it's not to be sighed at and dismissed, that the people who deliver criticism aren't necessarily just a bunch of trolls who want to stir up trouble? That it's very hard to figure out what's going on with Joomla, that posts happen in so many different places, the leadership is irritated that we didn't "know" about something, when it was posted in an obscure Google Group somewhere?

It all boils down to communication: communication between the leadership and the wider community; between the community and the open source world; between developers and their clients. PR firms are supposed to help the communications process.

Job #1 is to communicate to the Joomla community about why VOXUS is here and how they will help, and why it's better to spend money on them than on more Joomla 1.6 development. I am eager to hear their answers.