Joomla vs Wordpress – which is the better platform?

WordpressI’ve set up at least 50 Joomla websites in the past 3 years and at least as many Wordpress blogs. Both platforms have very strong, active communities that are constantly improving the products based on community feedback.

For small sites Wordpress has become a viable solution which I wouldn’t have said a year ago. Many new plugins and tool have appeared in the past year that make it easier to build a website instead of just a blog.

Joomla has matured and the release of the 1.5 platform last year solved many of the problems with the original version. They rebuilt Joomla from the ground up instead of patching the previous versions. Search friendly URL’s are now built into Joomla and my Joomla sites appear highly ranked in Google with little effort. Adding SEO plugins to Wordpress also makes it fairly easy to rank high in the search engines.

I still prefer Joomla for larger sites because I haven’t found a good menu plugin for Wordpress that lets me create menus with many levels that looks clean. . Joomla lets me create multiple menus located at the top, on the side and at the bottom of the website. I haven’t been able to create multiple menus in Wordpress without custom programming. Joomla community powered

I like the way Joomla lets me move content around in different module positions and I can define the module positions in the template. Wordpress is limited how you can display content. Widgets must appear in sidebars and it’s not as flexible as Joomla. I know you can create custom themes for Wordpress but it’s always the main column and 1 or 2 sidebars. I’m sure Wordpress will continue to evolve and become more flexible.

Wordpress was designed to be a blog system and evolved into a content management system. Joomla started as a content management system and continues to grow. Both systems have easy to use Admin interfaces but Joomla has a lot more features so it looks harder to use than it is. It’s like Microsoft Word. You have 1000 features and you use 10 of them most of the time.

To sum it up, I like both platforms and I’ll continue to develop sites in both platforms based on the client’s needs.

Share and Enjoy:
  • Digg
  • Sphinn
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Mixx
  • Google Bookmarks
Sphere: Related Content

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

Tags: , , , ,

Permalink Print Comment
  • MoonliteCreative
    Great post! It was refreshing to me to read a post in which the author was objective and not just a crazed fan/hater of one particular CMS because I truly don't believe there is one "best" CMS. As a web designer, I too use a variety of CMS systems (including WordPress & Joomla) on some of my clients' sites - depending on both the site's size/features and the client's comfort level with various systems. I think you've done a great job here at quickly summarizing some of the main differences in whether or not to go with WordPress or Joomla and agree with your conclusions. Thanks for posting!
  • tedprodromou
    Thanks for the compliments. Do you use any other CMS systems like Drupal? I started learning Drupal last year but the Joomla and Wordpress communities are much bigger. Drupal is very easy to use and is growing in popularity.

    Ted
  • MoonliteCreative
    Nope, I haven't ventured into Drupal yet, although I'd like to try it out soon. From what I've read about it, I can see some advantages to using it on some sites. I've actually used a couple of other smaller, simple CMS solutions for clients with really simple sites who really just want to make quick text edits or just update one feature on their site themselves like a gallery or product catalog and weren't comfortable having their whole site built in a CMS. http://www.edit.com has created some great custom CMS features for a couple of my clients. I just think each site needs evaluated for what the CMS needs are (and how technically savvy the client is) and then match the CMS to the client. (I actually recently wrote a blog post about that subject myself. Sorry for the shameless plug, but it seems relevant here: http://tinyurl.com/p59hwx )
  • I completely agree. I use joomla for websites, and wordpress for blogs. Simple as. It doesn't make sense using one for the other.
blog comments powered by Disqus
Login