Is Joomla a good CMS

[BigTopJoe]

I want to make an article site and have heard that wordpress is the best. I am hearing a lot about Joomla lately and wonder if it is better. Anyone?

[rknuppel]

Honestly I'm not a fan of joomla. Seemed to slow and bulky to me. But I haven't used it for a couple years now. I converted all my joomla sites to Wordpress a few yeas back and have been very happy with wordpress.

[TheOPC]

Originally Posted by BigTopJoe

I want to make an article site and have heard that wordpress is the best. I am hearing a lot about Joomla lately and wonder if it is better. Anyone?

I looked at Joomla - I wasn't a fan. Having used blogger extensively, as well as wordpress - I think wordpress is the best way to go - by miles... ! There's so many useful features available - free within wordpress.

I figure if it ain't broke, why fix it? Also, keep in mind, with wordpress, if you make "pages" as opposed to posts, you can pretty much create your entire website... I did not know this when I first started using wordpress and ended up coding my website by hand and only blogging with wordpress.

[addaminsane]

joomla is the best there is (for gambling info related sites) if you learn how to use it correctly. People who bash it have not looked into and realized its potential in terms of design capability, expandability, and content management. Wordpress is very easy out of the box, but if you actually explore possibilities with joomla and are willing to have the patience to learn how to use it you wont be disappointed.

FYI joomla isn't bad out of the box either, but to make it truly sing you will want to experiment and explore. There's a reason joomla is consistently voted the top open source CMS. People who rate all the cms's aren't stupid.

If you are actually interested in developing a kick ass site with a true cms i suggest a few learning tools. Your new site isn't going to take off very fast and will take longer to generate any rewards. I suggest getting the site indexed and using this down time wisely to expand your knowledge of creating an effective site in terms of seo, and layout to keep your bounce rate down.

http://www.w3schools.com/. You don't need to know a ton of html css to operate joomla, but to make it better than wordpress you should develop your knowledge. Developing your knowledge will help future projects much more fun and effective. If you use wordpress you actually need to have more of this knowledge because much of what it takes to turn wordpress into an actual cms is manual hardcoding.

http://docs.joomla.org/ - Read up on joomla basic functionalities and get tips here. Great Documentation

http://extensions.joomla.org/ Add great functionalities to your site. Loads of great extensions for free as well as paid. Theres extensions that can be adapted to almost anything you would like to do with a gambling info site

http://forums.joomla.org/ Not only submit questions but search for threads that probably already asked about the same thing you want to know about

particularly for your article site i recommend joomla. If you want to have people submit articles this is very easy to set up. The category permissions and ability for users to create profiles in joomla make joomla a better option for this venture than wordpress.

recommended optimizations for speed.

remove default loading of mootools.js in head of website. google this for info on how to do it within a template

gzip compress your site.

Joomla is naturally slower than wordpress because it has more features built in by default. It can be optimized to run decent on shared hosting however.

recommended extensions:

sh404sef plugin - this extension is amazing and will help you to have great urls for your articles
kunena forum component - if opting to go for an integrated forum, this is the best solution. With this you will have great features, sef urls via sh404sef, and a fully skinned forum within joomla template. I would wait however until 1.5 comes out of alpha

-these are only a few great plugins, there are tons just like wordpress depending on what functionality you want.

[BigTopJoe]

thanks for the info addam. That explains a lot about why some people think wordpress is better. I'm deciding if I want to outsource the development now. I guess if I do, I can find someone that knows Joomla and we can take full advantage of it.

[allinallen]

Very good info! I think I will try Wordpress...

[Charon]

Originally Posted by BigTopJoe

thanks for the info addam. That explains a lot about why some people think wordpress is better. I'm deciding if I want to outsource the development now. I guess if I do, I can find someone that knows Joomla and we can take full advantage of it.

I am a web developer and I work with both Joomla and Wordpress since years. Those two are both great solutions, I love to work with both of them. Yet, my opinion is that one can not really compare those two - simply because they have different aims, different approaches and they are built for different usage. It's like comparing two vehicles from two different categories.

Basically, these two offer following:
- Wordpress has been built for bloggers - someone who's main object is article publishing - meaning plain content with basic functions. And yes, it is great for use out of box. The more advanced your project gets, the more you have to tweak it, the more limitations you experience.

- Joomla on the other side is layed out for small portals and it offers lots ob possibilities to expand in almost any direction. You can also use it out of the box for the plain content (this is simpler to do in WP since this is WP's main purpose). Especially when it comes to custom made pages, parts of the pages or functions this is where Joomla kicks in and leaves WP behind. You can run your own community, give your members the ability to run it's own blogs, you can run a dating platform, an online store, download portals, link directories, link exchange systems and practically everything else.

Many of these aspects are also possible with WP but in a rather limited way and volume. It involves lots of tweaking and even then your area is limited. WP was not built for this.

So, simply think of your needs, of your site - if it is going to be a rather plain site, where articles are main focus and not many other functions, go with WP.
If you want to build a small portal with your own dynamic layouts and advanced functions, then you should go for Joomla.

In any case I would strongly advise you to work with professionals - especially if you are unskilled or novice at designing/coding. It would be pointless to start learning html/css/php/photoshop as it takes ages to master it all. There are lots of high quality commercial templates and extensions for both WP and Joomla and also vast numbers of developers on the market.

All the best!

[kingcobra]

Thanks for the informative post!