Switching to Joomla!

Sep

2008

Written by Ro

I've finally made the transition to Joomla from Wordpress. I made the choice to go with Wordpress after first setting up my site, it was simple it was easy and all was good for some time. But then I started to extend my platform, to make it do new things - and found that it was just too basic for my needs..

While Wordpress is easy to use and fast, every Wordpress driven website looks essentially the same. Increasingly I found its image handingling abilities really limited and the support for extended functionality minimal. It's templating system is downright disgusting, with some things (such as a blog roll) needing to be hardcoded into the template.

I've learnt that modularity, in most cases, is good. It makes things easy to change, easy to understand and easy to maintain. A good example is css driven websites. CSS handles the layout, HTML handles the structure. A template should then handle the layout and structure of the page, not the content. Bad Wordpress, Bad.

One of the things I've been working with in the past is a CMS called Joomla. While not specifically a blogging system, it can be used for any publishing type of development from news / corporate websites to blogs (as you can see here).

Templates provide room for content and room for modules. Modules can then provide additional features for your site, anything from menus, image scollers, latest updated posts, most viewed posts. Everything is modular.

Joomla's real advantage lies in it is extentions, which offer a dynamic range of functions for your site and unlike wordpress there are a massive collection of them. These functions mean that the same platform can drive my blog and my website and in future my business.

Joomla's feature set does not come at the expense of ease. It's easy to install and use, but like all things has a learning curve. It's like comparing paint and photoshop. While some people will undoubtedly love the simplicity and function of Wordpress, it isn't for me.

Watch this space. Joomla is here.

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