WordPress vs Joomla – Review

This is not a pro-contra review. In this article I try to give you some pointers to make it easy to chose between the two popular content management systems. The basic difference between WordPress and Joomla is that Joomla is a portal- or community type site while WordPress is a blog.  Both overlap each other in several areas and can be extended beyond their original purpose thanks to the use of plugins. You can find those plugins almost everywhere on the internet.  Both have a large user base with a lively community where tips and tricks are shared.  Both are free to use and many hosting providers have them as an option in their web tools section.  WP has a large community of volunteer developers, Joomla can count on many commercial add-ons by specialized professionals.

This topic is somewhat outside the scope of Miracle Tutorials, but the reason I thought it was important to publish is that it relates to the tutorials series Creating your own video channel by John, since we need to make a decision on a CMS system to work in that series.  So, here it is:

If you want to create a community or a network with a membership area, newsroom, forums, articles, input from external authors etc… then Joomla is a good choice because it is made to be that way.  Creating a navigation structure is easy, once you understand how it works and it doesn’t require knowledge of html. You can set articles to expire after a time, activate dates, authorname, breadcrumbs etc.. Thus, Joomla gives you a lot of power in your hands and that is noticeable in the admin section where there are so many options that you get dizzy the first time you go in. You really should get a good book on Joomla if you want to set it up fast. Otherwise you end up fiddling around and getting nowhere for days. A reasonably good starter is “Beginning Joomla” from Dan Rahmel. It guides you by the hand while customizing the site and setting up the naviagation structure.  There are other books, but I cannot recommend them since I didn’t read them.

Adapting the look is simple if you are happy with changing some colors and the logo. Beyond that, you will find that Joomla has a complicated structure and even seasoned web developers have to go through a learning curve before they master the layout system, and that approach is different depending on the layout template you chose.

If you do not want to get involved in the gritty work of stylesheets, you can buy professional layout templates for a reasonable price (between $35-$50) from JoomlaShack, for instance.  Or you could ask a developer to do it for you, but make sure they have references of Joomla sites or you might end up paying their learning curve and that is what you want to avoid.