Wordpress over Joomla (aka mp3 beats CD)

Within the last month, I have setup 4 Word­Press instal­la­tions. This blog, and 3 oth­ers for friends.

Now I won­der, why I have not cho­sen it over Joomla, for my own page…

When it came to rebuild­ing my web­site, I wanted to get away from flash, that I used on a cou­ple of web­sites I had build before. The main rea­son was main­te­nance. While flash gives you all of the cre­ative free­dom, you basi­cally remain the only one, who can prop­erly update the page with new con­tent. That, unless you are able to hack the admin back-​​end as well — which of course, I wasn’t.

So I looked at dru­pal, that I found a lit­tle com­plex to learn and 90% of the themes looked the same to me. At that time, word­press (2.5) appeared easy to use, but could not offer a cer­tain sub-​​menu func­tion­al­ity I was look­ing for out of the box. Joomla seemed to be the best of both worlds.

So I set off with Joomla, with an inter­est­ing theme from Rock­et­Theme. I was able to make the site look like I wanted, but I ended up with a quite slow site. I may have used huge images, but I guess, what breaks Joomla’s per­for­mance are the php and javascripts. You can install cache plu­g­ins, of course, but they are hot-​​patches to a fault-​​by-​​design issue in my eyes.
Keep­ing Joomla and all plu­g­ins up to date is also quite annoy­ing. So does the edi­tor, which seemed to has its own mind, when it comes to html WYSIWYG editing.

Enter Word­press 2.7 and later…

With an entirely new admin panel and the focus of find­ing the golden mid­dle between a blog and a “proper” cms. While keep­ing every­thing sim­ple and fast, Word­press deliv­ers, when you need easy and quick sites. That task will take you days, not months. You will not have an excuse for lack of qual­ity con­tent anymore…

It may not have all the abil­i­ties of typo3 and dru­pal, like strong media man­age­ment or multi-​​user man­age­ment. But is is such a joy to use. Good-​​looking, func­tional, focus­ing on the impor­tant things. Very much like OSX.
Word­Press is also much faster. It beats Joomla in the fron­tend and the back­end usability.

At the cur­rent stage, its media man­age­ment abil­i­ties are quite lim­ited, in com­par­i­son to the other tools that are avail­able for posts and pages, but those issues are being dealt with in the devel­op­ment of the 2.9 version.

Auto­matic updates of sys­tem, plu­g­ins and themes, cat­a­pult Word­Press into the realm, where almost every user is able to main­tain the site after a very short learn­ing period.

It seems, that the new abil­i­ties of the sys­tem allow design­ers to cre­ate themes, where you do not expect a “sim­ple blog­ging” sys­tem behind it. From Mag­a­zine, Port­fo­lio, Pho­to­graph and Videosites — all seem to be doable to a cer­tain level of scale with wordpress.

Here are a cou­ple of exam­ples for themes I like:

and more in this Word­Press Themes listings:

What all CMS sys­tems seems to have in com­mon, is that their themes tend to be either sim­i­lar or very flashy. Themedesign­ers like Gav­ick­Pro and Rock­et­Theme seem to go berserk lately, and try to put all fea­tures into their themes, they can think of. What used to be nice, fast and slick themes are now javas­cipt mon­sters, that blind you, just after you aged a mil­len­nium after wait­ing the page to load.

Same goes with Word­Press. You have to look very much into find­ing a proper theme, in terms of well designed, func­tional, fast and bal­anced. But once you do, it just is a hell of a ride.