CodeCrunch - Webmaster Tutorials, News and Design Blog

What end-users of products such and Joomla! and WordPress need to understand is that Content Management and Web Blogging software are two different worlds. While WordPress has the power and community support to act as a Content Management System (CMS), it is not the original foundation that the software was built on. In 2003, when blogging had become the de facto method to get on your own soapbox, WordPress emerged as a solid platform to do so. Directly from the WordPress website :

WordPress started in 2003 with a single bit of code to enhance the typography of everyday writing and with fewer users than you can count on your fingers and toes. Since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on millions of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day.

WordPress can certainly handle a large amount of transactions, and is structurally built to do so. However, when you plan in advance to manage your websites content, you plan according to what you want to present to your audience. For example : Website ‘A’ wants to deliver math tutorials, has to have a method to deliver downloadable executable files, and needs to be able to manage a community of thousands of users. They need a way to deliver content to end users, and offer articles explaining how certain formulas work. How the developer approaches this project will determine which software he/she uses in the back-end to manage the content.

The Developer, Programmer, Blogger Approaches

As a developer and a programmer, I know that handling thousands of web transactions comes at a cost to your server. Steps can be taken to alleviate your httpd loads etc…, but the point I am trying to deliver is that the wider picture is not being addressed by articles that compare Joomla!, Drupal, WordPress and other CMS’s. Blog articles on Joomla! and WordPress mostly address the functionality of the software, with the biggest concern being it’s ease of use. Many who have used Joomla! since the ‘Mambo days’, find Joomla! extremely easy to use, and more flexible for their content delivery, yet many WordPress users still continue to mix lingo. Don’t get me wrong – I love using WordPress because it’s extremely easy to install, easy to upgrade, and has a loyal base of community support. But when it comes time to manage a community of users, porting software that was meant for blogging creates more of a headache than it does create a good community.

Joomla! offer developers more wiggle room to implement third party plug-ins, make personalized customizations, and generally behaves better when managing user accounts. This is because by default, that is what these type of systems were created for – user management and access control. WordPress on the other hand is simply a blogging tool, that is more aimed at offering day to day users of the web a way to build a website without knowledge of HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL etc… and it does it very well.

Some Examples Please

Let’s look at an example of a very popular blog site, and then analyze their website to see if they implemented the right system. Doing this will give you a better idea in choosing a blog management tool or a CMS when deploying your project.

Now let’s take a look at how one site implemented Joomla! to manage their content and their users. Again, this will aid you in better understanding why the systems are implemented in completely different methods.