When you are designing a website for your company, you will be presented with a choice of many open source web design or content management systems. Of the many web publishing platforms, Joomla, WordPress, Typo3 and Drupal are some of the most popular and widely used. For E-commerce websites Magento, OsCommerce and Joomla compatible Virtuemart are some of the widely used open source platforms.

Although most platforms can be used for developing professional websites of any kindm many professional web designers favour Joomla for developing websites and WordPress for a blog.

Both Joomla and WordPress release new versionsofthe software frequently to solve bugs and security vulnerabilities. Both have an established development community and as such they are able to releases patches and version improvements in time.

The launch of Joomla 1.5x platform which is a significant improvement from its earlier 1.0x platform, the usability of Joomla has improved considerably. Both Joomla and WordPress have become popular platforms for developing and designing websites in the last few years. Although there are other powerful open source content management platforms, Joomla and WordPress have soared in popularity in recent years.

In my over 8 years of web design experience, I have used a combination of approaches for designing websites. At first I relied mainly on hand coding a site from scratch. In recent years I have used both WordPress and Joomla on many occasions. In my personal opinion, both software have advantages. I find WordPress to be the ideal choice for blogs or informational websites where the business logic is simple and complex workflow is not required on the website. On the hand when complex functionality or business process needs to be implemented on the website, I find Joomla to be the better choice. This article compares the two software and provides an insight into suitability for different situations.

WordPress versus Joomla

Usability

Most users find WordPress to be more user friendly than Joomla. However it is vital to note that Joomla’s administration offers a wide range of administration features whereas Wordrpess administration screen offers a fewer set of features. It is also worth noting that Joomla 1.5 has made significant improvements in usability over previous versions of the software.

Admin Features

Joomla has a more powerful administration interface thanWordPress. Compared to Joomla, WordPress offers an easy to use and simple interface where updating content and images is the key function. Joomla on the other hand has a much more advanced administration interface with a vast collection of core as well as add-on features.

The powerful back-end of Joomla can be used for a range of websites including large e-commerce (Shopping cart) websites, document management system, etc.

Versatility

Although WordPress can be used to develop a variety of websites, some developers argue that it lacks advanced content management capabilities offered by Joomla. Some developers and web designers see WordPress as a Blogging tool as opposed to a CMS platform. I have personally also used WordPress for developing standard business websites and have found it be very useful and easy to use.

Search Engine Optimisation

WordPress is excellent for search engines especially Google. Blog posts or pages created in a WordPress site are optimised properly for search engines and stand a better chance of ranking than most other web platforms. Joomla on the other hand may lack some of the SEO capabilities of WordPress in its default settings. However Joomla can be customers for search engines. With the right custiomisation, Joomla websites can rank equally high on Google.

Scalability

Some developers argue that Joomla has advantages over Wwordpress with regards to scalability. WordPress is an excellent software for designing blogs or standard websites where web publishing is the key requirement. Joomla on the other hand is suitable for developing simple websites as well complex web applications of any scale.

Joomla is equally good for designing start-up company websites as well large bespoke web based applications.

Integration with third party tools

Joomla has a powerful development API that can be used to integrate Joomla websites with almost any other external system of source. The core website elements can be extended and integrated with other systems as required.

Development of bespoke features

As discussed above, Joomla is more versatile for advanced development. It offers a well developed API that can be used to develop custom features to meet the specific needs of a business. Web designers and developers have been quick to offer thousands of bespoke add-on features for Joomla that are readily available for installing on websites. WordPress too is easy to extend and it is possible to develop bespoke features. However they are comparatively light-weight and limited.

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