Joomla vs Wordpress - My experiences recently

Have blogged about my recent experiences, prompted from an incident yesterday that left me rather frustrated.

Joomla – Fantastically Comprehensive or Prone to Breakage?

Would be interested to hear your experiences, out of sheer curiosity.

Richard

Having installed and managed hundreds of sites I can say I have never had one crash on me. Sometimes an install can corrupt across the web but, if your joomla crashed on you it might well have been the server that crashed and not the CMS. There can be instances when people are not familiar with Joomla where they inadvertantly set up something which causes instability but I am not aware of any such instances myself.

The only time I ever lost a site was back in the days of Mambo and I got hacked. Since then I have always kept my Joomla sites up to date, made sure my installations were 'clean' protected my directories and only installed stable extensions that I had tried and tested myself. Currently I only use 1.5.20 and have not upgraded to 1.6 but none of my sites are less than 1.5.20 and are as secure as I need to make them.

I am confident that your experience is an isolated one but am also aware of your leanings towards Wordpress so I hope this doesn't prove to be a joomla hatchet job as professionally speaking, both products have the same advantages and run the same risks and it comes down to wanting a light CMS or a heavyweight CMS and thats really the only difference. Clunky it isn't but then its really down to the user and how well they know the product.

I do see your point of view, completely Les. I used to love Joomla a lot, but have massively fallen out of love with it over recent months. It just does stuff very differently to Wordpress which I find a lot more confusing. I have certainly had many issues regarding Joomla, which is why I wrote the post. Whether they're isolated or not, it's still happened, but I see your point.

I am quite familiar with it overall, and it was all set up by a pro, not me personally. I got to grips with all the bits I was meant to get to grips with, but certainly don't venture into stuff I know nothing about, am very conscious about getting stuff wrong and breaking it. The bits that have broken of late have not been due to my error as it's just normal usage that I'm used to.

Am sure for a lot of people Joomla is the best thing ever, but of recent, me and it have had a distinct personality clash which I don't really see improving, hence the blog post. It's nothing personal :o)

Richard, which version are you running?

General opinion is that Wordpress is more user friendly but less developer friendly, Joomla - vice versa - more developer friendly, but less user friendly. I happen to agree with that. Also the fact, that Wordpress is statistically most popular CMS.

Will have to check version, logged out etc now.

Wordpress is generally the most user friendly; Drupal is the most (proper) developer friendly (i.e. for people who don't just install a CMS, a theme and a few plugins and think that makes them a web developer) - Joomla sits halfway in between

I disagree with anybody that thinks Wordpress isn't developer friendly. I've been developing almost exclusively in Wordpress for the best part of this year and have found it a dream to work with. It excels at content / listings / directory based sites and I can't see any reason to switch to another platform for these sorts of project. The core itself is incredibly flexible via the action / filter hook system (of which I assume there must be an equivalent in Joomla & Drupal), effectively allowing a developer to incorporate almost any functionality they like into any point during the flow of the application.

That said, I've not really done much dev in Joomla or Drupal and so have no real experience on which to draw a comparison.

Unfortunately I feel that WP does fall down when it comes to member / social and e-commerce sites (no matter what users of WPEC say). I've normally referred these types of projects over to other 4N developers, but feel grabbing a handle on another CMS would be a sensible move. I'm inclined to lean towards Drupal, but this is based purely on my personal research into the subject and no experience at all. I understand it is built better for scalability, which is another area that WP falls down on.

The difference between CMS products is purely ease of use and versatility and to be honest scope of extensions as CMS products generally come as a core product and everything is then bolted on, as required. There is certainly a difference in complexity with Drupal being the most unwieldy and heavy work while Wordpress being the most recent and lightweight arrival [It was a blog product and is now a CMS].

Joomla is not an 'inbetween' product at all it has the largest user-base in the world for a CMS and although Wordpress is larger by far, it is as a Blog not as a CMS that its main userbase exists.

The term Web Developer is not a snobby elitist term for people who hand-code nor is it their exclusive right to call themselves such. Web Developer means someone who develops websites and these CMS sites can require as much work and programming as any hand coded site and are often much more complex because of the sophisticated engine of the content management system used.

Joomla for example has been coded by a very large group of the worlds best PHP programmers to operate as a standardised platform for every conceivable use on the web today. It has hundreds of thousands of 'applications' that can be used with it even Wordpress can be integrated into it completely. ProjectFork is a Project Management system that fully integrates with Joomla and TigerCRM also works seamlessly with it. There is little that Joomla cannot do. Tesco's uses Joomla as a core product and many other large corporates also use Joomla. It is a serious product for serious business and it is seriously under rated by people who should know better.

You've completely misinterpreted my use of the term "in-between". If you read it again, you will see that I'm actually praising Joomla as being more balanced than the other two in the user-friendly/developer-friendly stakes.

As for the "Web Developer" debate - pure semantics - I use the term in the way it's used within the web development community at large. Speaking literally, you are indeed correct - but then someone who creates a meal from scratch is a cook, while someone who bungs a ready meal in the oven is not - yet both of them cook food. Not snobby, not elitist, just the way it is.

Also unless you have the capacity to develop your own systems, you are not in a position to compare complexities.

I have to agree with this. Not that I want to step on anyone's toes here, but wikipedia says:

A web developer is a software developer or software engineer who is specifically engaged in the development of World Wide Web applications, or distributed network applications that are run over HTTP from a web server to a web browser.

Sometimes, in fact most of the times people don't appreciate how difficult, complex and time consuming web developer's work is. Apologies for Off Topic.

Mike I used to write in HTML I found it tiresome and slow. I then progressed [like many professional developers] to using things like Dreamweaver. Why make the tools you need each time when there are ready made tools to take off the shelf. Does a DIY person who buys kit from B&Q do less of a job than a person who does it for a living? - Actually if they do a half decent job no, but they charge a third of the price and the end result is the same. I am renovating a house, a big house. I do it in my spare time and the end result is as professional as you would get from a builder and I use whatever tools I can get my hands on. The end result will be indistinguishable from using a profesisonal carpenter, builder or decorator. Just because one person writes in code and takes a month and I use a CMS and take a week and save myself having to learn PHP in depth and endless sleepless nights trying to find the missing semi colon in the codee I have written does not make me a microwave chef.

Too much credence is given to writing the code longhand. Get a typewriter it is quicker, more legible and keeps the lines straight. Even better get a word processor and have it spell check for you as well. Tools are meant to save time and money. Use them or sit there rubbing two sticks together to prove how celver you are. Meanwhile I will press the piezo button and have instant flame - because that is what tools are for.

My friend, Dreamweaver generated code is polluted and useless beyond imagination and good luck trying to make it work with majority of the browsers, I'm not even talking about broken links and other nightmares. Any real web professional would confirm what I just said. No need to learn PHP? Everything can be done with CMS? OK, for example what if the client asked you to change the date style in his website that runs on same good old Joomla, Wordpress or Drupal? When you know PHP that would take just a few minutes to modify related function, but when you don't - that makes it virtually impossible. If you work with PHP based CMS like the ones I mentioned you have to know PHP otherwise you limit what can be done with them considerably. I don't want to offend anyone here, but this is my subject and I know what I'm talking about.

The issue isn't whether or not you should use CMS'es etc - it's whether only being capable of doing so, and being incapable of anything outside of the end-user functionality of those systems makes you a web developer. The DIY analogy is a fair one - however would that person then classify themselves as a professional? After renovating your house, does that make you a builder?

If you genuinely think that knowing how to install and configure a CMS puts you at the same level as people who are able to plan, design and develop their own solutions - then honestly, that shows a complete lack of understanding or appreciation for web development.

Also to note - this isn't a "people who use a CMS vs people who only ever custom code" thing - I've used Wordpress for plenty of projects, as have many other well regarded web devs on here - however I am able to choose that as a solution due to my understanding of its workings and ability to identify it as the best option for the project in hand - not just because I'm limited to only using that system.

Mike/Vyk, because I decided that I want to use CMS, more specifically Joomla for building my web solutions and deliberately make it my business to do so then it does not mean I am less of a developer and doesn't mean I couldn't use other products including HTML to develop sites in. As for Dreamweaver sure today its code is buggy, clunky and not compatible with todays browsers but for many years it was an excellent product.

one of the constraints of using a CMS like Joomla is making sure that the code you hack does not make upgrading impossible therefore it is not generally a good practice to go slicing code around to make things fit. I use joomla because I am too tired to learn new code and spend sleepless nights trying to make things work. I have learned that knowing one thing very well and selling to my strengths is better than trying to look impressive in everything. I leave that to the kids who love that kind of thing.

I simply resent being classified as a 'microwave chef' because I have learned quicker ways to cook. At the end of the day if you enjoy my meals [I am actually a chef from working on the ships] then you are none the wiser but happy and content. You wouldn't believe how many 'chef's' out there do what is expedient and timely when cooking on a range.

If I wanted to spend my days up to my armpits in code, then I would have spent it in PHP or something else. I really don't feel the needs at 57 years old, to prove that I can by doing it. I have nothing to prove.