The basic difference between WordPress and Joomla is that Joomla is a portal- or community type site whilst WordPress is a blog.  Both overlap each other in several areas and can be extended beyond their original purpose thanks to the use of plugins. You can find those plugins almost everywhere on the internet.  Both have a large user base with a lively community where tips and tricks are shared.  Both are free to use and many hosting providers have them as an option in their web tools section.  WP has a large community of volunteer developers, Joomla can count on many commercial add-ons by specialized professionals.

To Joomla or not to Joomla

If you want to create a community or a network with a membership area, newsroom, forums, articles, input from external authors etc… then Joomla is a good choice because it is made to be that way.  Creating a navigation structure is easy, once you understand how it works and it doesn’t require knowledge of html. You can set articles to expire after a time, activate dates, authorname, breadcrumbs etc.. Thus, Joomla gives you a lot of power in your hands and that is noticeable in the admin section where there are so many options that you get dizzy the first time you go in.

Adapting the look is simple if you are happy with changing some colors and the logo. Beyond that, you will find that Joomla has a complicated structure and even seasoned web developers have to go through a learning curve before they master the layout system, and that approach is different depending on the layout template you chose.

In short:
Joomla’s strenght is in complexity.  Deep level navigation, sections in sections, categories etc… It has fixed pages and posts, posts Great for community sites, you can create a regular site with it but I would regard that as overkill.

To WordPress or not to WordPress

WordPress is basically a very user friendly blog system but it can be used as a regular site which you can update without any knowledge of html (the same goes for Joomla). You can create pages and posts, and with plugins, you can add a lot of functionality included standard in Joomla, except that all code is web standard.  And because WordPress is web standard, Google really loves it.  So, from a marketing standpoint, WordPress is hard to resist.

The interface is easy to understand. Adapting the look requires some knowledge of CSS, the style sheet language. Like with Joomla, if you select a template close to what you want, adapting the colors, logo etc.. is not that complicated but if you do not want to get involved with CSS, and you would like to re-arrange navigation elements as well, you might consider hiring a web developer. Since WordPress has a logical structure, it is easy for a developer to change things around, place ad banners etc…Again, give preference to a specialized developer used to work with WordPress.

It is setup very quickly and you can be listed in Google within 2 days.  I haven’t seen any other system doing that so far. A normal site takes up to 2 months to get listed in Google, so this is something to take into account.  Anybody can learn enough in 2 hours to create content with WordPress right away, including using categories and sub pages.
WordPress can handle tons of visitors.  It will not break down easily.

Disadvantages of WordPress:

For instance, adding or removing post dates, need to be changed in design mode and it requires knowledge of WP scripting. The navigational structure is determined by the layout template you chose. Changing that structure again requires knowledge of the WP scripting language and CSS.  With Joomla, you do not run into this problem because menus are controlled via the control panel and attributes like dates, author name etc, can be turned on and off per article or for the whole site in one go. In that sense, Joomla is much more a content management system.

Also, changing the order of categories or pages is rather cumbersome in Wordpress.  It involves having to go into all of the categories and change the order by hand. The WP developers are working on it to fix it, but when is unpredictable.

In short:
WordPress is simple, you can see it as a blog or as a regular website.  It has fixed pages, posts and categories.
Through the use of plugins you can extend its functionality and let it grow as big and complicated as you want.  However, not every plugin is easy to understand.

What do I need for my video channel?

You can add membership functionality in WordPress but Joomla will handle membership much better as it is really made for things like that.  So, let’s say, while presuming you do not want to tinker with scripting:

• If you want members to access your videos on a subscription basis and have members in various levels of permission (depending on their subscription level), Joomla is your best bet.

• If you simply want to show your videos on your site, or you only have 1 type of members and you want things to be simple and clean, WordPress will do nicely.

• If you want to show off different types on videos on your home pages from different sections, more or less like a magazine, again Joomla is better equipped for it.

• If you want to create a video journal, WordPress makes life really easy for you

Original Source:  http://www.miracletutorials.com/wordpress-vs-joomla-review/

Tags: Functionality, Tutorial

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 22nd, 2010 at 6:52 AM by Lucy and is filed under Tutorial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.