Wordpress / Joomla question

Ingenious

Well-known member
After reading in the other forums about bridges between xF and Wordpress/Joomla I've had a look over both of these for the first time.

Apart from some custom PHP/MySQL stuff for reviews and the likes, and of course the forum, my site has been hardcoded for the last decade or so. Great for doing unique, custom web work but not so great for being able to easily update it from anywhere. Or, more importantly, allowing other people access to add content.

Being a vB3 user I was initially interested in vB4's CMS, but personally I just don't like the look of it, nor does it look easy to customise (that's a personal opinion, not a dig at vB).

So having looked over Wordpress and Joomla, having a CMS built for the job, and bridging with xF, seems a good solution.

But what are the main advantages of either Wordpress or Joomla? I have not used either so am a bit lost. I'm not interested in blogging (although blogging software could work for this), it will be mostly to publish articles, also static pages, but I need to ideally be able to change static pages such as the home page fairly easily. Articles would need to be in categories. It also needs to be easy for me to customise with my own layout, size, colours, logos and creating menus etc - again ideally from on-line and not by tweaking files on the server.

Any thoughts from anyone with experience with either? Thanks.
 
Based on my own experiences with both, I find Wordpress much easier to use with more features and an active development community. Joomla is, in my opinion, dying and falling behind other known CMS's.

Hope you find a solution that works for you. I know it feels to re-do an entire hard coded website. Make that a bunch of hard coded websites. :D
 
Based on my own experiences with both, I find Wordpress much easier to use with more features and an active development community. Joomla is, in my opinion, dying and falling behind other known CMS's.
I'm running around 100 WP and Joomla based sites.

Joomla of course is more advanced, extendable. You can achieve basically anything with it (a CNN/BBC type of portal or a community site).
Joomla has also the worlds best/most sophisticated templates, template frameworks and template overrides out of the box. (My favorite frameworks are JA T3 V2 Framework, Warp5 Framework, Gantry Framework)
I think Joomla and Drupal the best complex free CMS-s (and of course it's very active and not falling behind of anything).

WP has a better/cleaner interface for sending entries and manage a basic site. It also has a smaller learning curve so it's well suited for the novice user...
If you need a simpler news site go with WP if you need something more advanced/complex go with Joomla...
 
Thanks guys. I'm already a bit lost with words like "templates" and "frameworks" and the likes - looks like the best way might be to try both, download them and have a play. Goyo I've had a look at your links and some of the example sites there look stunning.
 
Thanks guys. I'm already a bit lost with words like "templates" and "frameworks" and the likes - looks like the best way might be to try both, download them and have a play. Goyo I've had a look at your links and some of the example sites there look stunning.

I downloaded WP last Friday and I've only spent about 4 or 5 hours playing with it and considering I've only ever used the vB CMS before I've got to say it's bloody easy and I am pleased with what I was able to throw together in such a short time (see my test site).

Basically I was just testing functions, creating articles & sections, installed a skin and a couple of plugins (eg the flexi pages widget, which expands like the vB one when you click on a section such as 'what's on') and by accident ended-up with a basic layout, which I reckon is better than my actual site (main site), that whilst basic took bloody ages to suss out.
 
I downloaded WP last Friday and I've only spent about 4 or 5 hours playing with it and considering I've only ever used the vB CMS before I've got to say it's bloody easy and I am pleased with what I was able to throw together in such a short time (see my test site).

Basically I was just testing functions, creating articles & sections, installed a skin and a couple of plugins (eg the flexi pages widget, which expands like the vB one when you click on a section such as 'what's on') and by accident ended-up with a basic layout, which I reckon is better than my actual site (main site), that whilst basic took bloody ages to suss out.

Thanks for posting that test link. I quite agree with you, the WP one looks better. The vB one has all the things I dislike about vB4's CMS - a little but too much clutter especially the log in stuff at the top. If you can do that in a few hours with WP its given me some hope!!
 
Thanks for posting that test link. I quite agree with you, the WP one looks better. The vB one has all the things I dislike about vB4's CMS - a little but too much clutter especially the log in stuff at the top. If you can do that in a few hours with WP its given me some hope!!

As I say the 'design' was by accident, I just clicked 'appearance > install themes > [one of the options at the top of that page, forgotten which] in the adminCP and up popped that blue skin, which is ideal for a local seaside town site. :cool:

ETA - And once you spot a skin you want it's just one click in the adminCP to install it and a second click to activate it.

I've got to say the adminCP is a real blessing for a novice like me and so much better and easier than vB to get around.

I also totally agree with the vB clutter around the login area, it's a total mess and I can't believe how they ever thought that was a good design feature, I did try to change it but not being a coder I kept borking the template and finally gave up after wasting about 12 hours on it, grrr.

Another thing I found useful with WP, which will be well handy when I switch over, was that I could just copy & paste an article on my present site (viewed as a visitor in Firefox, not in edit mode) and it copied over images, text formatting and working links straight into a WP article! :D
 
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