Hear me talk about Wordpresss and Joomla A friend was confused about the difference between the two and asked me about it. I told him that Wordpress is a CMS used for developing a web app or website earlier. He was surfing the web and came across Joomla. He told me that he has discovered another CMS. I laughed. It was Joomla he discovered. I asked him about Drupal, Contao, CntentMadeSimple, Magento, Saurus, Silverstripe, e107, OpenCart, elgg, Dolphin, Phpfox, Oxwall, Simple Machine, Concrete5, Xoops, FuelCMS, MyBB, Amarok, Manhali and others, if he has discovered the likes of them too. He said no. He asked to know more between Wordpress and Joomla. Whether you have a web host or youre developing on your localhost once youve got a web script, its time to decide how to actually build the pages of your website. There are several ways to go about it. The most basic and also the most intimidating road to build your web page is to hand code it using programming languages like HTML, CSS and Javascript and PHP. The problem with this traditional method is that it involves a pretty long learning curve that often scares away the non-tech-savvy user. This problem was solved with the advent of open source content management systems (CMS)like the WordPress and Joomla we are talking about. These provided a graphical user-interface and considerably reduced the need to learn any of the programming languages. You could just click a couple of buttons here and there and yappee! You would have had a page with its most common elements flash on your screen. My writing on this is intended for the non-technical user or someone without any knowledge of programming(for I know the boss men are reading this too) for that, what I’ll do, is to help you(newbies) decide which platform to opt for. One term that you might have frequently came across while educating yourself about this field is Content Management System or CMS. As the name suggests it is kinda a software to help you manage the information or content of your website (as it is also known these days in online publishing). WordPress and Joomla fall under this category. What follows now is essentially a comparison between the two. From my experience, Ive known WordPress to be developed as a blog software but with time the community grew and it evolved as a full fledged CMS. The code generated by WordPress is web standard and hence Google loves WordPress. Its easy to install, customize and you can easily create pages and posts with its graphical user interface (GUI). To add more customizations and functionality, there are add-ons called themes and plugins. The structure of the navigation is decided by the template you choose, though you have always an option to fully control it via backend. WordPress Themes are pre programmed designs that control the look, feel and functionality of your site. However, altering the structure requires knowledge of WordPress scripting language and CSS. The interface that WordPress provides is easy to understand and one normally does not require a book to find his (or her) way around. With Joomla it is advisable to get a good book if you do not want to spend days fiddling around and getting nowhere. Joomla is preferred usually when you want to create a community or a network with memberships, news rooms, forums and article input from other authors. Moreover, in Joomla you could set articles to expire after certain time, activate dates, author names, breadcrumbs etc. Creating navigation structure is easy once you understand how its oriented. Beyond this point, however, things get somewhat complicated and seasoned programmers also have to go through a learning curve before they can play around with the layout system and that also depends on the layout template that you may choose. Another issue to be taken into account is that Joomla requires a lot of resources from the server as its core structure is complex. The database needs to be tweaked for improved performance, otherwise with a few plugins here and there, and the website begins to break down at around 50,000 visitors or so per day. But, the most important point to be considered is - what do I need the website for? WordPress is simple to learn and comprehend. You could see it as a blogging platform or something a little more serious. (Like, Ive got a social network solely built developed with Wordpress) The CMS has fixed posts, pages and categories; all of which are intuitive and best to begin with for a novice. Joomla may seem complicated at first and that’s because it is a bit complicated. The functionality it provides requires complexity and thus makes it all the more intense, focused and catering to more evolved needs. For instance, if you want to have your members at different levels of permission and you want to have your content presented more or less like a magazine, Joomla is your best bet. Hope it helps. To your online success #JettyTheGeek
Posted on: Fri, 12 Sep 2014 10:43:43 +0000
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