Wordpress or Joomla?
Although it is possible to build a content managed website in both Joomla! and Wordpress, it is important to make the correct choice for your site.
Making the right choice from the start will give you more flexibility if you decide to develop the site in the future.
Wordpress
Although Wordpress can by styled to look like a brochure website, it is designed primarily for blogging. Wordpress is great for posting articles and tagging those articles by category and date, but it can be inflexible if you want a more varied website structure, with more complex features such as galleries, or forums.
Points to consider for a Wordpress site:
- There are limitations in the designs that will work with Wordpress. Most Wordpress sites will look very similar, having the blog-based page structure.
- There are far fewer extensions available for Wordpress than Joomla!. Joomla! has freely available extensions for most of the common features found in modern websites. If you decided upon a Wordpress-based site, it is likely that any non standard features would have to be written from scratch.
- It is more common to use Wordpress as part of a website, rather than as a website in itself. We think that it is the best software for blogging, but its limits are reached very quickly when it is put to any other use.
Joomla!
Joomla! is a complete content management system (CMS), and therefore provides a far richer set of features than those of Wordpress. Joomla! was developed to allow the creation of fully designed websites that could be easily maintained and updated by the site's owner.
Points to consider for a Joomla! site:
- All common features of a modern website are supported - galleries, news, blogging etc.
- The large and growing library of freely available extensions for Joomla!
- Joomla!'s rich features do make it a little more complicated to update than Wordpress. However, we provide a written guide to updating your Joomla! site, and ultimately Joomla! is designed to be as user-friendly as possible.
The difference between Joomla! and Wordpress is summed up rather well in the following quote: "WordPress is built around writing content and publishing that content. Joomla! from the beginning is built around presentation of content."
It is quite common to find that a site which needs to be updated and also needs a blog will use both systems, having the best of both worlds.
It is even possible to get the best of both worlds. A site can consist of a Wordpress blog and a Joomla! content managed site running side by side. There is even a solution that integrates Wordpress within Joomla!