If you are looking for an open-source content management system, your choices are likely to boil down to these three: Joomla!, WordPress, and Drupal. Professional CMS developers tend to disregard WordPress as a purely blogging engine. The primary reason for this condescending attitude is fear. WordPress is significantly more user-friendly than any other CMS software out there that can be easily paired with invoice tools. With WordPress you can achieve professional-looking results without having to hire a programmer. With Joomla! and Drupal you are likely need lots of expensive help.

On the other hand, WordPress is still limited in certain areas by its blogging origins. Joomla!, for example, offers many more features than you will find in WordPress. The question is: do you need these features? Speaking from personal experience, Joomla!, WordPress and Drupal are all fine CMS platforms, but picking the wrong one for your needs may end up costing you a great deal of time and money. WordPress can be installed and configured in minutes. A professionally-designed theme will cost you under a hundred bucks. You can easily modify a WordPress theme to incorporate your company’s logo and any other design features.

With Joomla! and Drupal the installation is almost equally effortless, but this is where the similarity with WordPress end.

Sample Joomla! installation

I actually like Joomla! for its power and flexibility – especially during the punchout catalog development that we tried and successfully tested. Regardless of what the WordPress fans are claiming, Joomla! is easy to install and here is the proof. The following installation was performed using RocketTheme’s Versatility4 template ($40), MySQL 4, and Joomla! 1.5. The template ZIP file, which included the Joomla! 1.5, was downloaded from RocketTheme site and unzipped into a directory on the Web server, running SuSE Linux and Apache2.

Oops, the installation script is complaining that it cannot modify some files in the installation directory. I need to make sure the installation directory is owned by the Apache2 user:

chown -R wwwrun:www /srv/www/htdocs/sandbox/joomla_versatility4

This is my test server and so it is configured to display PHP error messages. Joomla! installation script here reminds me that this is not the recommended practice for a production server.

Here Joomla! needs me to provide the database name and user information. The first step is to create the database:

mysql -uroot -ppassword
mysql create database 'sandbox_joomla_versatility4';
mysql CREATE DATABASE sandbox_joomla_versatility4 ;
mysql GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON sandbox_joomla_versatility4.* to root@"%" IDENTIFIED BY 'bd872673' WITH GRANT OPTION ;

Of course using the root account for database access is not very smart of me, but do not get distracted by fine details.

Once again, I am using root account for FTP access – do not do this at home. The “FTP Root Path” is actually the path to the site’s root folder.

Enter site name, your e-mail address and the desired password for the admin account. Clicking on the “Install Sample Data” button will populate the database so your new shiny Joomla! template looks its best.

Don’t forget to delete the installation directory:

rm -r /srv/www/htdocs/sandbox/joomla_versatility4/installation

This concludes the easy part of Joomla!’s setup. The rest will be fairly technical. If you have chosen Joomla! over WordPress, then you probably have some sophisticated requirements for your Web site.  A staff of programmers, sysadmins, DBAs, writers, editors, and graphical designers is highly recommended. What? You don’t have an IT development company department? With all due respect to Joomla!, perhaps you should give WordPress another look. If you think I am being overly dramatic, feel free to poke around in Joomla!’s admin interface and see how far you will get.

Joomla! is advanced. Just the front page alone has dozens of independently-managed areas to display articles, menus and sub-menus, headlines, login and search fields, advertisement banners, etc., etc., etc. Keeping all this real estate up-to-date is like publishing a magazine or a newspaper. If you don’t have the resources to run your own newspaper – Joomla! – then, once again, you should reconsider publishing a newsletter – WordPress – instead.

We don’t need to go far to find one Joomla!’s many bugs. Just try the user login window and good luck figuring out what went wrong…

This is not to say that WordPress or Drupal are without issues, but there is a big difference between fixing a moped and repairing a space shuttle. Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying WordPress is more robust or better written than Joomla!. It’s just that Joomla! has many more moving parts and, thus, there are more things that can go wrong. This is why your moped is usually running and the space shuttle always seems to have a leak in the fuel lines. Joomla! and Drupal in many cases require a professional touch and this is exactly why these professionals get all worked up when you mention WordPress.

Majority of Web sites I have seen running Joomla! would have had the same functionality under WordPress. These sites simply don’t utilize Joomla! to anywhere near its full potential. This means that people running these sites are wasting a great deal of time and money on a complicated CMS they don’t really need. But there is another side of the coin: there are plenty of WordPress-powered Web sites that have long outgrew this CMS. Their webmasters keep things running by adding dozens of plugins, modifying the core code, tweaking complicated Apache settings, and writing server-side scripts. These people would have save a great deal of time and money by switching to Joomla! or Drupal. Especially since they already seem to have the necessary technical expertise. It’s all about making the right choices. Go to the article now.

If it is complexity you desire, WordPress may still be a good choice. The key is finding the right template. Since WordPress was originally a blogging engine, most of WordPress templates out there are designed for that purpose. But there are many WordPress templates developed for other purposes. Consider the “WP Newspaper” template, for example. It might as well be used by a major national newspaper.

You may be surprised to learn that WordPress is the engine behind blogging sections of CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and Reuters. Properly configured, humble WordPress is capable of handling a tremendous volume of authors and readers. It is safe to say that, at the very least, WordPress managed to catch up with the leading CMS platforms. And any claiming otherwise simply haven’t seriously used WordPress in the past couple of years.

When it comes to Web design, I am a proponent of the minimalist approach. I hate sites overloaded with useless Flash and Java applets. These sites are slow, annoying and, contrary to their authors’ intentions, not the best-looking either. Effective presentation must be always counterbalanced by functionality. It doesn’t matter how pretty your Web site is, if half the visitors leave your site before it finishes loading. If you’re in need of a company that specializes in project management and Javascript to team up with, check out this site https://devsdata.com/.

Simplicity of design also lightens the load on your database, the Web server and computing resources, incresing speed and reliability. I have seen too any Web developers who spent months customizing their WordPress or Joomla! site, just to see the whole thing crumble when a new version of CMS, PHP or MySQL was released and their software was updated, many businesses can’t afford to have their websites crumble when this happens and need some state of the art software to keep their sites up, much like they need due date tracking software to keep track of their customers and when they have to pay their bills, both are equally important.