Joomla vs Wordpress

14 years ago

Well what it boils down to is this.....

Do which you find easier... more importantly, if your clients will be taking over the websites, what they find easier (which is probably going to be wordpress).

Wordpress is pretty much idiot-proof (not to offend anybody). It's not a full blown amazing CMS (joomla seems to be able to hand more), but I use wordpress, and really find it intuitive. I'm going to be playing with joomla tonight as a matter of fact, to learn it. I feel it's good to know all 3 of those CMS's in the end.

The general rule of thumb is wordpress for smaller sites, joomla if your going to be doing a "mega-site", and Drupal if you're code-savvy. Drupal is pretty barren when it comes to the "templates" and all that stuff... but if you can do some of the stuff on your own, it really turns out the best IMO. But I don't have the know-how or the time to do that. So I currently use wordpress, and MAKE NO MISTAKE ABOUT IT.... it's NOT just a blog platform. It can be considered CMS like the best of em. You can really do some amazing things with wordpress, but again, IMO, if I was doing a big site (20+ pages) with multiuser access (this is where joomla REALLY shines) I'd probably pick joomla. I'm going to be teaching myself joomla over this week, so I'll know both.

Wordpress took me 24 hours to figure out and figure out relatively well.... I'm expecting joomla to take until the end of the week (72-ish hours)... so it's got a little bigger learning curve.

As far as being more SEO friendly, you can really make wordpress SEO friendly with a few addons. I've heard google likes wordpress sites (treats them correctly anyways)... and I haven't had any issues with mine so far. I unfortunately can't comment on the SEO side of joomla until weeks end.

For tossing up some small sites, which is mostly what I do, I'll probably keep using wordpress I have a feeling in the end. But like I said before, it's really good to familiarize yourself with all of them, so I'm going to teach myself joomla as well. Who knows... maybe I'll really like it and it will replace wordpress for me? I have a web-design buddy of mine, and he MUCH rather would work with wordpress over joomla, but he prefers drupal out of the three.

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markjdudek 14 years ago

Hi millerb7,
I'm new here (post count says it all really), and while reading through the forums came across your post. I was interested to read that you're having a look at Joomla, as I took on creating a Joomla website for a customer from scratch a few months ago, knowing very little about it. It's been a very steep learning curve, and I spent a lot of time trying to get my head around Joomla's quirks and "features" :-)
No way am I an expert, (I know very little about html & php) but if you're stuck on anything Joomla related I might have hit the same problem, so please ask me in case I can help.
The Joomla forums are a great source of info, as is the Virtuemart forum for the shopping cart module - definitely worth a look.

All the best,
Mark.
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Aare

14 years ago

website, that comes with wordpress as its platform will have many advantages, such as u can add some utilities by using plugins, or doing the SEO job also based on the plugins too. I second the wordpress...

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dzinerfusion

14 years ago

Each platform has its own needs and advantages. I use Wordpress because I am used to it , for my blogs, cms etc. However, wordpress was made in the first place for blogging, so I would definitely use them for a blog.

For Joomla, they were used originally as a cms, so I recommend you try it out for a cms website.

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agha

14 years ago

it depends on our goal to built up a website. if you want to sell something online, better you use joomla

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~kev~

14 years ago

My personal opinion - forget about joomla.

How many big sites use joomla? Not too many.

How many big sites use drupal and/or wordpress? A lot!!!!!!

Examples:

The onion - uses drupal
Foxnews blogs - uses wordpress
PC Gamer - uses wordpress
news.van.fedex.com - uses drupal
blogs.computerworld.com - uses drupal
maximumpc.com - uses drupal

Take a look at this site, it gives you a chart displaying the most popular CMSs - http://www.backendbattles.com/Conten...gement_Systems

If drupal is good enough for Fedex, computerworld, and The Onion, surely its good enough for your sites.

Just think about that Foxnews blogs for a second. Some of the biggest and most popular blogs in the world are run on wordpress.

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Hubb.co

14 years ago

Wordpress is much more flexible, in terms of the plugins available, Joomla doesn't have a huge range like Wordpress.

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tyankee 14 years ago

i've used all 3 in my business and won't even think of using Joomla, or Drupal any more.. there's just no need to.. Wordpress has all of the plugins you'd ever need, thousands more template designs, and ease of use and maintenance.. furthermore, it's self intuitive and you can't say that about the other 2.
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- Aliaksander 14 years ago
  
  I prefer Joomla much more. As you said Joomla is not as SEO friendly as Wordpress. Just put the SEO friendly links option on and set the .htaccess to make it look like example.com/category or example.com/category.html. What can be more SEO friendly?
  
  Wordpress is great for blog. Huge pages on wordpress looks overloaded. Joomla is good for portals, private pages, corporate pages. Not for huge projects. Cause for huge projects people use custom soft. Not drupal, not wordpress, not joomla.
  
  Aliaksander
  
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  parzlou 14 years ago
  
  I started with Joomla when I ventured into cms platforms a few years back... and while it was suitable for my personal site needs, it was a bit quirky...
  
  I quickly found wordpress to be more user friendly and that was key for me if building a site to flip.
  
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  ~kev~ 14 years ago
  
  Originally Posted by Aliaksander
  
  Cause for huge projects people use custom soft. Not drupal, not wordpress, not joomla.
  
  Aliaksander
  
  Oh boy,,, I dont even know what to think about that statement.
  
  foxnews blogs has 40,800 pages indexed with google - and they use wordpress. How much of a bigger site do you want as an example then fox news blogs?
  
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MuscleLegion

14 years ago

I have been using wordpress, and it is extremely easy to use.

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millerb7 14 years ago

I still haven't really gotten to play with Joomla!, just can't fully justify leaving wordpress haha. It is really nice to use, SEO friendly, and you can DO A LOT with it. None of my sites are blogs, and they are all done with wordpress... there are a million themes out there.

One thing I like about wordpress vs joomla is the abundance of free themes, or themes in general. I mean even if you look at themeforest, joomla has ~80 pages of themes, where wordpress has 250+.

I'm still gonna play with it though, I just already hate the category, page, etc. thing haha.

On wordpress it's called "pages"... very simple! We shall see as I play more though.
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Jarrod Morris

14 years ago

Fleki,

Over the past 2 years my company (3 guys) have built close to 100 sites. We've used Joomla, Drupal and WordPress. Hands down, WordPress is the number one solution in my book. And let me share why...

1) WordPress seems to be the most search engine friendly platform - comparable sites in similar industries seem to rise in the search engines more quickly on WP.

2) It is easy to learn and for clients to manage after you are gone

3) It has the fastest growing community of people developing plugins, widgets and other add-ons. It's like having a development team at your fingertips always creating new functionality, with out spending a dime on their efforts.

4) There are literally thousands upon thousands of themes to choose from. The selection of plug and play templates out number Joomla and Drupal by at least 20 to 1.

5) I really liked ~kev~'s statement about the fox news blog having 40,000+ pages and being hosted on WordPress. Well, guess who else has their website built on WordPress... iContact and Ford. So yes, the WP SQL Database can handle "mega sites" that receive a ton of traffic.

6) The possibilities are endless - if you haven't played with WordPress 3.0 yet, do so, and you'll see what I'm talking about.

7) Too many reasons to list here

I am actually building an A-Z WordPress BluePrint right now. The goal is to help everyone - from the guy who says, "what is WordPress" to the business who has had a site on WordPress for 3 years (Newbie to Advanced). The product will probably end up being 60+ training videos on WP 3.0 and 200+ page pdf companion.

I am curious to hear input from other Warriors as to what your questions are about WordPress. If you have any, post them here and I will do my best to reply.

Jarrod

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~kev~

14 years ago

Originally Posted by Jarrod Morris

I am curious to hear input from other Warriors as to what your questions are about WordPress. If you have any, post them here and I will do my best to reply.

Jarrod

The main problem I have with wordpress, I want recent post category blocks on the home page.

Example - cnn.com

Scroll the home page a little bit and you will see the category blocks - politics, us, world, business - with links to recent post in that category.

I would like to have that on my wordpress site, with 2 or 3 category blocks at the top of the articles. And then reduce the number of live articles on the home page to like 5, instead of 10.

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jasonthewebmaster

Banned 14 years ago

Originally Posted by Jarrod Morris

Fleki,

Over the past 2 years my company (3 guys) have built close to 100 sites. We've used Joomla, Drupal and WordPress. Hands down, WordPress is the number one solution in my book. And let me share why...

1) WordPress seems to be the most search engine friendly platform - comparable sites in similar industries seem to rise in the search engines more quickly on WP.

2) It is easy to learn and for clients to manage after you are gone

3) It has the fastest growing community of people developing plugins, widgets and other add-ons. It's like having a development team at your fingertips always creating new functionality, with out spending a dime on their efforts.

4) There are literally thousands upon thousands of themes to choose from. The selection of plug and play templates out number Joomla and Drupal by at least 20 to 1.

5) I really liked ~kev~'s statement about the fox news blog having 40,000+ pages and being hosted on WordPress. Well, guess who else has their website built on WordPress... iContact and Ford. So yes, the WP SQL Database can handle "mega sites" that receive a ton of traffic.

6) The possibilities are endless - if you haven't played with WordPress 3.0 yet, do so, and you'll see what I'm talking about.

7) Too many reasons to list here

I am actually building an A-Z WordPress BluePrint right now. The goal is to help everyone - from the guy who says, "what is WordPress" to the business who has had a site on WordPress for 3 years (Newbie to Advanced). The product will probably end up being 60+ training videos on WP 3.0 and 200+ page pdf companion.

I am curious to hear input from other Warriors as to what your questions are about WordPress. If you have any, post them here and I will do my best to reply.

Jarrod

Wordpress is nothing that special.

Joomla has a much larger support forum than wordpress and 3 times the number of add-ons and templates. You obviously don't know where to look...

Joomla also has SEO and SEF URLS built in, no need to add a bunch of add-ons and crap.

But you are right about one thing: Wordpress is much easier to learn, especially for clients who may be managing the site themselves in the future.

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RichardHK

14 years ago

I have been reviewing the holy trinity of Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal for some days now. Decided on Joomla which seemed like a dream CMS but then found out I need to fiddle somewhat to suit my SEO needs. So went back to Wordpress given its SEO friendly reports, but oh so many plugins to make it all work.

Anyway, I did more research and came up with more modern CMS options like SEO Toaster and ModX. Either of these two seem to be light years ahead of any of the usual suspects talked about endlessly. And I personally prefer to be different anyway.

So, never mind Joomla vs Wordpress, it is still relevant to ask what about SEO Toaster and ModX vs Wordpress/Joomla? Any comments?

If nobody answers I will assume folks are keeping these secrets to themselves.

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Fleki 14 years ago

I just went to seotoaster.com and i'm still looking at the 5min video. It looks like it's so simple to handle that even my 3 year old daughter could make a website. I'm only halfway into the video.
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Kysersoze

14 years ago

Joomla is good but nothing beats Wordpress, just on the amount of support and resources available on the net to help you should be more than enough to convince you. You can customize Wordpress now to the point that it is an actual CMS system (cause some people still debate that it isn't) and themes now a days can be made to look like any site out there not just a blog. Good luck to you.

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jasonthewebmaster

Banned 14 years ago

Originally Posted by Kysersoze

Joomla is good but nothing beats Wordpress, just on the amount of support and resources available on the net to help you should be more than enough to convince you. You can customize Wordpress now to the point that it is an actual CMS system (cause some people still debate that it isn't) and themes now a days can be made to look like any site out there not just a blog. Good luck to you.

Actually, you are quite wrong here.

Joomla has over 6 thousand add-ons compared to wordpress's 1500. It also has a much larger support forum.

Wordpress will never be more than a blog system with add-ons. That's just the truth. You can't call it a CMS because it's not.

That being said...wordpress is MUCH easier to learn for newbies, so you should probably go with that!

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thedigitalshopper

14 years ago

Wordpress is extremely easy to use, even for unexperienced users and newbies. Whereas Joomla has more of a "frustration phase" in which you try to do the slightest modification and it does not work, of course once you learn to use it and overcome your frustration it is a great CMS. Wordpress can be used for a lot more than blogs (it is like a CMS) and is easy to modify (how categories are displayed, how content is displayed, etc) by someone with html knowledge and common sense.

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izapharry

14 years ago

both of cms are fine but wordpress is the best for me

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adriennbelly 14 years ago

I have used Joomla to create a website with several writers and several blog categories nested categories and found it perfect. Do not plug either K2 or Flexicontent I think that Joomla would be your best bet.
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