Word. Press v Joomla: Introduction and Content Structures. The Word. Press v Joomla debate has been an argument — no, an all- out war. В — for years now. The issue with this war of the CMS titans is that it’s largely being fought by biased individuals, rather than debated from an objective standpoint. I’m not the first person to discuss this topic and I certainly won’t be the last. I feel, however, that there has been no really good comparison between Joomla and Word. Press in recent times. WordPress v JoomlaWordPress v Joomla: Introduction and Content StructuresWordPress v Joomla: Templates and ThemesWordPress v Joomla: Plugins, Extensions, and CustomizationWordPress v Joomla: Search Engine OptimizationWordPress. Channel Digital Cookie Plugin works on versions 1.5, 2.5 and 3.0. Full support available from our team. Lite (free) and pro version available. ProFiles is the next generation web file manager. From the creators of Proforms and Mad4Joomla. Find extensions for your Joomla site in the Joomla Extensions Directory, the official directory for Joomla components, modules and plugins. В For this reason, Site. Point is going to bring you a series of articles discussing every major area of comparison between Word. Press and Joomla as they stand in 2. This is what you can expect to see throughout the six blogposts: An Introduction to Word. Loading. Requirements: Joomla 1.5 or 1.7 or 2.5; PHP 5.3+ Urgent Notice: Version 2.0 maintains Security Release status. If you use a version earlier than 0.6, you need to upgrade immediately. See changelog.txt for change log. Why should I migrate? A Joomla! migration gives everyone a new opportunity to: Revisit site goals and rethink its purpose; Clean up “great ideas” that never saw the light of day; Inventory third-party extensions that may. Press and Joomla. Joomla Templates v Word. Press Themes/Templates. Customization Potential of Word. Press and Joomla — plugins, extensions, etc. Word. Press SEO v Joomla SEOIs Joomla or Word. Press Better in the Support Department? The Winner. В Announced! An Introduction to Word. Press. Word. Press really needs no introduction as it is currently the most widely used CMS in the world. I would, however, like to draw your attention to the following information: Technical Stuff. The Word. Press CMS is based on PHP and, like most content management systems, uses My. SQL for database management. For these reasons you’re going to want to make sure you’re using an Apache (Linux) host with mod_rewrite enabled (for URL rewriting) because it will make your life a whole lot easier. Word. Press is licensed under the GNU GPL which outlines how the CMS may be used by the public. Standalone v Hosted. An interesting point to note is that Word. Press offers both a standalone CMS as well as a hosted Word. Press facility at wordpress. В — so even if you don’t have your own domain, that doesn’t mean you cannot run your own website. It’s worth noting that if you use wordpress. For this reason I would always recommend investing in a cheap hosting account and registering your own domain so you can use the standalone version of the Word. Press CMS, which is obtainable from wordpress. The wordpress. com version of Word. Press is also quite a bit more limited than the self- hosted version. From Then to Now. Word. Press was created in 2. В — which apparently had a user base of around 2. В The system was created by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little along with contributions by the developer of b. Michel Valdrighi. Since its inception, Word. Press has grown to be the most popular CMS on the internet, currently hosting approximately 2. Alexa Internet’s “Top 1 Million” websites. Source]. В It is currently sitting at version 3. Word. Press has thousands of well- known brands as active testimonials for their CMS. В Some of the more popular websites currently using Word. Press are: And of course, Site. Point itself is created using Word. Press! Content Structure of the Word. Press CMSWord. Press’ content structure is basically broken down into Pages and Posts. Pages are generally used for static content (eg an About Us page), whereas Posts are your regular updates (eg blog posts). Each page/post can be assigned to a menu which will form the base of your website. Posts are grouped into Categories, and defined even further by the use of Tags. Additional content can then be added in and around the base content using Widgets. Widgets can be placed in several places on your pages, and you can define pages on which you would not like to display each widget. В There are many widgets that are natively available, including tag clouds, recent posts widgets, post categories and a whole bunch of others. Functionality can be added to Word. Press by downloading and installing Plugins. There are thousands of Plugins available which will perform practically every function you could ever think of. You can use Plugins to turn your site into an e- commerce store, a download repository, a sports statistics website and many other weird and wonderful applications. Now let’s take a look at the Joomla CMS. An Introduction to Joomla. Although Joomla could easily be considered the second most popular CMS around (sorry Drupal fans), it would probably be fair to say that it is still relatively unknown to many who aren’t familiar with web design/blogging or aren’t even sure what a CMS is. Technical Details. Joomla, like Word. Press, is based on PHP and My. SQL, which means you should also be looking to use an Apache host here. I feel Joomla’s file structure is far more confusing and cluttered than the Word. Press file/content structure is. We spent significantly more time deciphering Joomla’s object- oriented code than we needed to spend for Word. Press. В В For the average user, however, this is not much of a concern. Joomla, unlike Word. Press, does not have a hosted facility. This means you will need to host your own Joomla website and have your own domain name in order to use the CMS. From Then to Now. Joomla was created in 2. Mambo. The J! development team created the Joomla project in response to a controversial move by the founders of Mambo, who turned the project into a non- profit organisation. The development team also founded a movement. В — Open. Source. Matters. org — and within hours had hundreds of fans voicing their support. Joomla was created with the intention of creating a free and open- source CMS, as well as a great online community centered around the CMS. Joomla have just released version 2. This is good: we are finally starting to see some functionality incorporated into Joomla that should have been there from the beginning. On the downside, frequent updates often mean we need to wait for Extension developers to update their components before we can successfully update to the latest version of Joomla. While Joomla doesn’t enjoy the same fanfare Word. Press does, there are still some big names using Joomla as their CMS of choice. Linux. com is one of the biggest names using Joomla for its website and has been using it successfully for a number of years. Interestingly, Mc. Donalds in the Arabian Peninsula has also opted for Joomla. В to back their website. Another big name using Joomla is e. Bay – not for ebay. Bay uses Joomla to manage their intranet of 1. This application in particular highlights how powerful Joomla can be. The Joomla Content Structure. At first, Joomla seems slightly more complicated than Word. Press. My opinion is that this is simply because of its naming of different content items and some slightly less obvious ways of achieving certain objectives. For this reason, most people who start out with Joomla find figuring out the content structure to be a bit of a learning curve and this often leads to them abandoning Joomla altogether. What most of these people don’t understand, initially, is that Joomla’s content structure is very similar to Word. Press’. Articles or Components generate a page’s main content. Content is linked to a menu using menu items — which basically provide a vehicle for the display of a certain piece of content. Menu items can be a whole host of different things — for instance, a menu item can be set to display a single article, an entire category of items, the output from an extension/component which has been installed (eg a contact form component) or even an external URL. This is slightly different to the Word. Press functionality, in which functionality is usually added to a Page by embedding a little piece of code (Shortcode) which is provided by the associated plugin. Modules are Joomla’s equivalent of Widgets. В Modules are displayed around the main content and are generally used to add in peripheral bits of content; for instance a Weather module, a Login module or a Latest News module. Joomla’s menus also need to be created using modules, or else they will not show up anywhere! This is exactly how Word. Press’ menus function too. A Menu widget needs to be created which will be set to display a particular menu in a specific position. Joomla can be extended by using Components, Modules and Plugins, all of which can be downloaded from the Joomla Extensions Directory. Whereas Word. Press uses the term “Plugin” to encompass all of its extensions, Joomla tries to narrow it down a bit by grouping extensions by the function that the extension performs. Unfortunately, I think this is one of the areas which leaves first- time users a bit bewildered. Conclusion. Right off the bat it is quite evident that Word. Press is the more popular of the two systems. That said, Word. Press is also a couple years older than Joomla. Word. Press was created to enable creators of content to easily publish that content. It is currently used as the blogging platform of choice. My opinion is that it is great at exactly that — blogging/content curation — but perhaps not as flexible in other departments. Joomla is generally used for websites of a slightly more static nature, as well as for more advanced uses, such as the e. Bay intranet. This doesn’t mean that it cannot power blogs or content- oriented websites, but I tend to find that it’s not everybody’s first choice for this. Word. Press’ content structure is slightly easier to grasp for newbies and first- time users of Joomla tend to have trouble grasping the terminology and application of certain functions. In the next post we’ll discuss templating for Joomla and Word. Press. In the meantime, which CMS do you prefer? Let me know in the comments!
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