Comparing WordPress and Joomla

Over the past few weeks, I have been telling people about being able to use WordPress to get their site up and serve as the CMS running behind, and most of them will ask me to compare WordPress and Joomla.

I surfed on and found an superb article comparing WordPress to Joomla. The article in Mamboat emphasises more on the extendability and use of both systems. Eventually, Joomla may outperform WordPress as a CMS, but as a personal publishing platform, WordPress rules! Here’s what the author, Tash said:

… to compare these two software as a personal publishing system, I would say that WordPress built around writing content and publishing that content. Joomla from the beginning built around presentation of content – reflecting absolute meaning for CMS – Content Management System. Managing content in some nice way first and only then writing and publishing it.

I’ve personally tried both, and what I feel is that Joomla seems like a very complete system, like it comes out of the box able to build your menus, your weblinks, your “contact us” form, polls and everything, your content can be static or dynamic, and its great to use Joomla if you are familiar with all the great features. In addition to that, you can also extend Joomla with different components, mambot and modules. The downside is – for the Joomla newbie, its tough to pick up. I had to download a user guide and read it to understand how it works!

WordPress comes out of the box as a clean blogging platform, and getting started with publishing your blog posts is really intuitive. WordPress is extendable using plug-ins, and customizable using themes – and you can find a truckload of them from WordPress.org. However, again, for the newbie to start customizing it takes time. You don’t have a navigation menu at the top out of the box, even though its easy to find a theme that does that in the WordPress site.

My personal feel to this is – if you are going to be the person customizing and extending the system and then using it, I guess its easier to start with WordPress, because by the time you’ve learnt about the templates and the template tags, you are already ready to customize WordPress into whatever you want out of it. However, if you’ve got an expert to create and build the CMS base for you, and you are only the person managing the content, I still feel that Joomla does a better job.