Joomla vs WordPress

What is Joomla?

Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone.

see Joomla official website

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What is WordPress?

WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

see WordPress official website

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WordPress Usability

As Playing with Fire has pointed out Joomla has a lot of catching up to do on the Usability front, WordPress makes simple tasks really easy to accomplish with few clicks to get a task done such as adding an image, publishing a page or publishing a news item.

For the website owner running a business website or a blog I haven’t found a CMS that has better usability than WordPress.

Training

When I train clients on how to manage their websites It usually takes about 40 minutes with WordPress, often a few hours with Joomla, though Joomla has more powerful features, every day tasks the client wants to learn take much longer to train.

Unfortunately once a client has received training in Joomla they often need tips or hints at how to perform a task again a few weeks later, that scenario hasn’t come up once with WordPress.

Why use WordPress over Joomla

If you have a small to medium size business I believe WordPress is currently your best open source option to manage and update your website on a daily basis, tasks are very easy to accomplish, everything is well thought out and I find myself saying this to a lot of clients when training “Everything is where you’d expect it to be” .

WordPress has an amazing community around it and the in depth documentation is second to none, as a designer or a website owner you’ll find everything you’ll need by the very people that make it and then also by enthusiasts such as myself.

Why use Joomla over WordPress

My programmer voiced to me that the main pro for using Joomla is it’s power and flexibility, and its true, with me designing and my developer programming we can make Joomla do anything.

The capabilities of Joomla are endless and custom database work is an area where Joomla particularly shines.

Joomla has a complex multiple user privilege system with user registration and layered content privileges. WordPress does not have a traditional privilege system at all.

When multiple user groups are needed I turn to Joomla, if a business requires multiple users be be able to login and view the website with different content that is user privilege dependent then I believe Joomla is the best open source CMS for the task.

Joomla also has an amazing community based around it, but the official documentation has great depth but is poorly organized, I found the best documentation from external sources.

Conclusion

Joomla was designed from the ground up as a CMS, WordPress as a publishing platform that has evolved into a CMS, giving each unique strengths and weaknesses.

I think both platforms are fantastic for managing a website, WordPress for small to medium business and Joomla for a website that requires multiple user privileges or custom database work.