WordPress or Joomla?
For some people it might be like being asked, “What’s your favorite Operating System?” Or “What’s your favorite type of music?” and my answer is ALWAYS the same.
That would depend on what you’re trying to do.
Some people take it personally which OS they use or type of music they listen to.
The same pretty much goes for the arguement between WordPress & Joomla.
It ALWAYS depends on what you’re trying to do.
Many people try to say that anything you can do on Joomla you can do on WordPress.
I will respectfully disagree. I can hear the diehard WP people collectively whining.
I will say that WP has evolved into more than just a personal blogging platform. Absolutely.
The WP community has grown and even absorbed some Joomla devs into the folds.
I love WP just as much as any web designer.
It’s at the heart of our business. Perfect for small business websites.
Excellent for small shopping cart websites.
Perfect for affiliate marketing, list building, landing pages etc.
The best for portfolio galleries… at least the themes we use are anyway 😉
We even build small reservation websites with WP.
But that’s basically it.
When you want to build a large community website, corporate intranet, large magazine site that has several contributors or a handful of other “enterprise class” business models, I suggest Joomla…ALL DAY!!
The scalability of Joomla is so much easier (by easier I mean less headaches) to implement than on WP.
While WP makes it much ‘easier’ to build smaller websites & landing pages.
But before you even get started with WP, you need a handful of plugins to handle basic functionality that is already built into Joomla.
User management, ads manager, or even the ability to add meta descriptions to content.
One that I like in particular with Joomla is the ability to have a different template for every menu item if I like. This is available right out of the box while with WP this would require multisite.
While WP plugins are typically less expensive, they’re usually more watered down for those reasons.
By watered down, I mean they will have fewer settings…which means less control over functionality.
The downside? More settings means more complicated = more time.
Honestly, there are certain things I trust Joomla to perform better than WP & things that I trust WP to perform better than Joomla.
So again, It ALWAYS boils down to what you’re trying to do.
There’s a reason 99% of web servers operate on Linux/Apache. Because Windows & Apple suck for it!
There’s half a dozen reasons anyone would prefer to use a Mac to edit video over Linux.
Because it sucks to do it with any of the programs available for Linux, but you’re not going to host those videos to the internet on an Apple server.
That simply sounds absurd, right?
WordPress has it’s purpose just as Joomla has it’s purpose.
There’s even room for others like Drupal.
Sidenote:
I like how much easier it is to find extensions for Joomla vs finding plugins for WordPress.
The WP people keep saying that they’re going to improve the directory but it hasn’t really gotten any easier to find anything.
You can’t sort by rating or by free vs paid. This makes it very difficult to find the good stuff.
With all that said, maybe I have a personal bias. Let me explain.
I simply love open source and have somewhat of a prejudice towards things that aren’t.
I love my Linux machine & I currently do a ton of work on a Chromebook. Both open source.
Windows or Mac? Not so much… with the obvious exception of video editing. =D
Again, we can all agree that Linux pretty much sucks for that still.
I love WordPress & Joomla equally. Probably because they’re both open source.
ASP programs? Again, not so much & there really isn’t anything I can think of that I would use it for on a website… just saying.
Yep, I simply love open source.
Whether it’s WordPress or Joomla, they both do a wonderful job at lowering the barrier of entry for anyone to be in business on the internet.
Anyone that doesn’t love that is simply evil!
Open Source FTW!
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