After heard about WordPress for many years as a Content Management System (CMS) and after using different bloated CMS, e.g. PHPNuke and Mambo/Joomla, I decided to try out WordPress for my professional blog site.
I’ve been using Mambo then Joomla when the core developer broke away from the Mambo company for my personal blog site. I was impressed with Joomla when it released version 1.5. However, I always feel that Joomla is to bloated and too complicated for my purpose. I’ve tried Joomla for the company I work for as well but it failed to pass the usability for the Marketing department. I know Joomla is being use at many places but it’s time for me to let go of Joomla and pick up something a little big lighter.
WordPress is provided by the hosting company that I am using so it was a breeze to setup and configured. There is no need to download anything at all. Just point and click, and type and confirm. Within 1 minute, I have a site all ready for me to play with. I am impressed!
The free themes/templates available are amazing. The themes are quite professional quality as well. It is far better that the themes provided by the Joomla community. Most of the themes are very basic and are too restricted by the box-bounding style that are in majority of the Joomla theme designs. In contrast, the themes for WordPress are well designed and many of them broke away from the box-bound design.
The site administration is simple as well. Despite the restrictions, such as able to create sections and create own menu, creating pages and posts are very easy with the editor provided. Installation of themes and plugins can be done via the administration panel where the search and install facility available means there is no need to download, transfer the the server, unzip and install the components. All those can be done using the web interface. However, you can do the manual process if you want as well.
WordPress has a concept of widgets, similar to modules for Joomla, that can be drag (using DHTML and AJAX) from the widget list to the different blocks available on the theme. There is one little negative point that I don’t like when changing themes, the widgets may disappear from the new theme. I have to drag the widget back to the theme again. Maybe, this is a advantage as well as disadvantage. The advantage could be that it is flexible on where you want to place the widget with drag and drop. It also, provide flexibility for the theme designer as well.
Now that I am impressed with WordPress, I am going to migrate my Joomla site to WordPress.