WordPress Vs. Joomla

Two platforms. Two sets of skill. Two brilliant outcomes.

Joomla

I remember when I first began using a content management system (CMS). I believe I was 15 years old, actually I know I was because my parents and I were taking a trip to Boone, NC to visit some people they knew way in the Blue Ridge Parkway. I know I was fifteen because I remember pestering them to let me drive, and anyone knows that once you actually get your license your want to drive disperses. Anyways, we were visiting these friends of theirs and we were settling in for the night, I was bored and began surfing the net and somehow stumbled across this script inside my web host called “Joomla”. I had never heard of it before and I didn’t even know it was a platform to build websites, I just installed it for curiosity. It was Joomla 1.5.2, and early, though at the time current, version of Joomla. It installed with its simple default template. So I began looking through the system and literally had no clue to what I was doing. As I began to get the feel of the platform and how it worked I decided to build a website about Apple Products. It was meant to be an information source about products built by Apple (Actually I just ripped the information off of Apple.com). Before I knew it it had become 3:30am and I was still working on this stupid website. But this single event introduced me to real website development.

Since then most of the websites I designed were done soley in Joomla (verses Adobe Flash, which is what my websites were at the time). It was easy to update and cross compatible on all browsers. And… it did the hard work for me.

Joomla is a great platform. I love it to death. It was so powerful in the amount of options your website could have. There were millions of plugins available that you could add to your site with the blink of an eye. And I loved it.

WordPress

Before I began using Joomla I had a simplistic knowledge of WordPress. I had a blog hosted within WordPress.com that was started at the end of my sophomore year of high school. It was a simple blog that consisted of nothing really. I knew somewhat of how the platform worked and functioned but since it was a self-hosted (on WP.com) version I really had no clue how the codex within its system functioned till I began using WordPress several months later.

At first WordPress was just a blog platform for me. I used it to host my personal blog at DanielWaters.org. The platform reserved for mainstream websites was Joomla. I simply figured WordPress was best fit for blogging. Was I wrong. I ran into some friends who used WordPress as their platform for some of the websites they created. They gave me a quick tour at the ultra simple platform I would come to know and love. Instantly I began researching how WordPress was made up, what its codex was, and what files it used to run itself. I began testing out websites within my own servers and seeing how they matched up to Joomla. One major thing stood out: Simplicity. WordPress used minimal amounts of files and extremely simplified codex whereas Joomla used literally thousands of files and had a much more complex codex.

Outcome

While still keeping my feet in the water with WordPress I decided to switch over one of my websites to 100% WordPress. It was a move that I was unsure of. I did not know all the quirks to WP and if a problem arose I could have been left in a lurch.

My main websites that were trafficked much more continued to run on Joomla power. I was still in testing mode with this whole WordPress thing. One of the people I worked with (on one of my major websites) came to me one day and told me that our website was great but that WordPress needed to be its backbone, because it had more room for improvement and because Joomla was sometimes too weak to handle our traffic.

This set the ball rolling and now almost all of my websites are becoming 100% WordPress. Joomla is still a powerful tool and I still keep around the most updated versions of it within my server to see what its capabilities are, but for now WordPress will continue to host my websites.