wordpress vs joomla

By Rudolf Boogerman |

270 comments… Click to Contribute.

Revised on 11 August 2013 – 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 setup of video portals and which CMS to chose, 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, author name, 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. You can find a whole range of books on this subject with Packt Publishing.

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.

Joomla has multi-lingual capability built-in. This works very well but it is not that simple. You have to follow a certain order over actions to make it work, but it is very powerful. Luckily, there are many video tutorials available on YouTube. Just type “joomla multilingual” in the search box and you will find what you need.

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.

Importing articles from one site to another is not easy. There are extensions for it, but moving from one version to the next can be problematic.

A remaining problem is that the core system is very complex which demands a lot of resources from the server. This has not improved in version 2.5, in fact, it got worse. No problem if you have 500 articles or so, but if it runs into thousands, you may want to check out this article: http://www.itoctopus.com/how-we-optimized-a-large-joomla-2-5-website-and-made-it-over-200-times-faster

Joomla now brings out new major upgrades on a regular basis. These upgrades break a lot of extensions and migrating from older versions is not an easy task, especially when you have a complex setup with membership system, forum etc… This is something the Joomla community really needs to address because moving to the latest version can be time consuming. We hope this will get better in future upgrades.
Simple updates between upgrades are easy to do with a click on a button, they seldom break anything.

In short:
Joomla’s strenght is in complexity.  Deep level navigation, sections in sections, categories etc… It has fixed pages and posts, posts Great for community sites, you can create a regular site with it but I would regard that as overkill.

WordPress is basically a very user friendly blog system but it can be used as a regular site which you can update without any knowledge of html (the same goes for Joomla). You can create pages and posts, and with plugins, you can add a lot of functionality included standard in Joomla.  Because WordPress is a blog system, Google seems to love it.  So, from a marketing standpoint, WordPress is hard to resist.

The interface is easy to understand, you won’t need a book for it, although buying a “WordPress for Dummies” – book will save you some time if you have no experience with blog management at all. Adapting the look requires some knowledge of CSS, the style sheet language. Like with Joomla, if you select a template close to what you want, adapting the colors, logo etc.. is not that complicated but if you do not want to get involved with CSS, and you would like to re-arrange navigation elements as well, you might consider hiring a web developer. Since WordPress has a logical structure, it is easy for a developer to change things around, place ad banners etc…Again, give preference to a specialized developer used to work with WordPress.

It is setup very quickly and you can be listed in Google within 2 days.  I haven’t seen any other system doing that so far. For Joomla, it takes about 14 days, although you can push it by using SEO tools. A regular html site can take up to a month to get listed in Google, so this is something to take into account.  Anybody can learn enough in 2 hours to create content with WordPress right away, including using categories and sub pages.

WordPress has no multi-lingual capability but this can be managed with a plugin like Polylang, which is quite easy to use.

WordPress can handle tons of visitors.  It will not break down easily, even with loads of articles.

Major upgrades of WordPress are not as frequent as Joomla and they seldom require extra work. None of my plugins have broken between 3.1 – 3.6, which makes it a very stable platform.

Importing posts and pages from other WP sites is easy. There is built-in importer.

Disadvantages of WordPress:
For instance, adding or removing post dates, need to be changed in design mode and it requires knowledge of WP scripting. The navigational structure is determined by the layout template you chose. Changing that structure again requires knowledge of the WP scripting language and CSS.  With Joomla, you do not run into this problem because menus are controlled via the control panel and attributes like dates, author name etc, can be turned on and off per article or for the whole site in one go. In that sense, Joomla is much more a content management system.

Also, changing the order of categories or pages is rather cumbersome in WordPress.  It involves having to go into all of the categories and change the order by hand. The WP developers are working on it to fix it, but when is unpredictable.
Widgets can help compensate for the lack of a strong menu system like Joomla, but it is helps and it is quick to setup with the drag and drop feature.

In short:
WordPress is simple, you can see it as a blog or as a regular website.  It has fixed pages, posts and categories.
Through the use of plugins you can extend its functionality and let it grow as big and complicated as you want.  However, not every plugin is easy to understand, so it might be a good idea to have a specialized web developer in case of emergencies.

All popular opensource CMS systems are vulnerable for hackers because they know the system. Joomla and WordPress are both attacked on a regular basis.To minimize the threat, you at least should follow these measures: