Mitrang Technologies Blog

We don’t compare WordPress and Joomla  as both overlap each other in several areas and can be extended beyond their original purpose thanks to the use of plugins/extensions. You cannot compare a blog app and a CMS as they are like a toothbrush and a Shoe Brush – you can only compare a Colgate ToothBrush versus an Oral-B ToothBrush. If you want to get online fast, and need the best streamlined publishing tool there is – use WordPress. If you have several different tasks in mind and slick presentation is one of them – use Joomla or a comparable CMS at least.

The site owners we know who use WordPress as an extended webapp in CMS mode have three times the work to do compared to Joomla owners, and the results are not as good.

WordPress is a quick publishing tool and a micro-CMS while Joomla is a multimedia publishing tool and a full CMS. Which is best for you depends entirely on what you need it for.

WordPress

Although WordPress can by styled to look like a brochure website, it is designed primarily for blogging. WordPress is great for posting articles and tagging those articles by category and date, but it can be inflexible if you want a more varied website structure, with more complex features such as galleries, or forums.

Points to consider for a WordPress site:

• There are limitations in the designs that will work with WordPress. Most WordPress sites will look very similar, having the blog-based page structure.
• There are far fewer extensions available for WordPress than Joomla!. Joomla! has freely available extensions for most of the common features found in modern websites. If you decided upon a WordPress-based site, it is likely that any non standard features would have to be written from scratch.
• It is more common to use WordPress as part of a website, rather than as a website in itself. We think that it is the best software for blogging, but its limits are reached very quickly when it is put to any other use.

WordPress – basic tech spec
application type: blog publishing tool
cost: free
license: OSS (GNU – GPL)
installer includes: core files including editor
installation type: remote via web, or on local machine
codebase: PHP, MySQL
database type: MySQL
server type needed: LAMP, IIS
[a Microsoft IIS server will need PHP and MySQL, and cannot work 100% as an htaccess file is needed, as for all PHP-MySQL webapps]
dedicated server needed? no
additional server apps needed: no
zip size: 3MB
# of plugins available: ~5,000
shopping cart option: yes

Joomla! is a complete content management system (CMS), and therefore provides a far richer set of features than those of WordPress. Joomla! was developed to allow the creation of fully designed websites that could be easily maintained and updated by the site’s owner.

Points to consider for a Joomla! site:

• All common features of a modern website are supported – galleries, news, blogging etc.
• The large and growing library of freely available extensions for Joomla!
• Joomla!’s rich features do make it a little more complicated to update than WordPress.

Joomla – basic tech spec
application type: multimedia publishing tool Web Content Management System (WCMS)
cost: free
license: OSS (GNU – GPL)
installer includes: core files, 1 visual editor
installation type: remote via web, or on local machine
codebase: PHP, MySQL
database type: MySQL
server type needed: LAMP, IIS
[a Microsoft IIS server will need PHP and MySQL, but can never run at 100% as an htaccess file is needed for some functions]
dedicated server needed? no
additional server apps needed: no
zip size: 6MB
# of plugins available: ~5,000
shopping cart option: yes – several including an ecommerce CMS version

Tweet