WordPress vs Joomla

Joomla vs WP


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noel2626

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Hello all just looking to get some feedback from users who have used or currently using Wordpress and Joomla. My goal is to create an e-commerce site. The route I would like to start is to integrate PayPal as a start (up to 50 items). Eventually I feel purchasing an SSL cert and moving away from PayPal, having a shpping cart etv...may give a better overall user experience as far as shopping and staying on the website - so with that said, your thoughts - WP vs Joomla ...best template/themes (free) you have seen for shopping site? Any plugins that you have used that are successful in your shop? Scalability into an e-commerce site? Any other tips & thoughts -
 

mattx

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Actually I have been away from x10Hosting for a while and I seen this thread and figured it would have been flooded with responses, quite surprised that it wasn't, not even a vote (until mine).

WP is so much better than Joomla, WP shouldn't even be compared to Joomla, there are soooooo many more developers working on WP than Joomla and you can find lots more extensions and plugins than you would ever find with Joomla, I only used Joomla for a short time back in mid 2000's, once I got into Wordpress and seen all the extensions, I always found what I needed, plus being able to test drive themes from the admin panel is a plus (if you want a free theme), the only thing is IMO that Joomla was easier to make themes for (at least back in the day) than wordpress.

WP has a lot of e-commerce options just search the plugin database at Wordpress site.
 

fretwizz

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Yeah, WP has pulled ahead of Joomla in so many ways now there's no contest unless you are already a great Joomla developer.
 

phoebex2

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I tried both when I was a beginner, more or less, and both were such a hassle for me at the time that I eventually settled for a Wordpress-hosted Wordpress. I have a lot of experience with WP, relatively little with Joomla, so I couldn't really make a fair comparison between the two, but that single vote up there for "Other" is me...

I have since tried out and used just about every single set of blog scripts in existence, and what I've settled on personally is what I've been able to hack together myself out of various code snippets found via Google and some funky one-file script I found on a site that had maybe three words total in English and which was coded, if I'm not mistaken, in 2002. I used to have to tell it to ignore errors, but have since done everything possible to update the deprecated code while keeping it functional. Yes, I finally decided to be a responsible coder.

Maybe it's just me, maybe I'm weird, but it just feels good. You know? It's got a fairly light footprint for something which uses no remote database (dbs are my kryptonite), being as simple as possible means I can change things easily and make it do pretty much whatever I want, and at least two of the world's highest-traffic websites use their own modified versions of the same script, albeit for different purposes.

I'm not in any way trying to pooh-pooh the two most popular blogging platforms out there, I've just found that for what I use these things for I can make it just fine using something simple and my own brain (which is also, perhaps, something simple, who knows). My idea of a plugin is to find the spot in the code where the new snippet will work and paste it in, which perhaps makes me a sort of Neanderthal in terms of coding, but I have yet to blow up a server or hog resources or even get my site hacked. As for antispam, I've even worked that out. One line of code. End of spam flooding.

I'm sure one day I'll eventually find something more complex (or go back to WP or something) and do things to it to make it into what I want, but until I'm big enough to take that step on my own I'll be voting "Other."
 

fretwizz

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I tried both when I was a beginner, more or less, and both were such a hassle for me at the time that I eventually settled for a Wordpress-hosted Wordpress. I have a lot of experience with WP, relatively little with Joomla, so I couldn't really make a fair comparison between the two, but that single vote up there for "Other" is me...

I have since tried out and used just about every single set of blog scripts in existence, and what I've settled on personally is what I've been able to hack together myself out of various code snippets found via Google and some funky one-file script I found on a site that had maybe three words total in English and which was coded, if I'm not mistaken, in 2002. I used to have to tell it to ignore errors, but have since done everything possible to update the deprecated code while keeping it functional. Yes, I finally decided to be a responsible coder.

Maybe it's just me, maybe I'm weird, but it just feels good. You know? It's got a fairly light footprint for something which uses no remote database (dbs are my kryptonite), being as simple as possible means I can change things easily and make it do pretty much whatever I want, and at least two of the world's highest-traffic websites use their own modified versions of the same script, albeit for different purposes.

I'm not in any way trying to pooh-pooh the two most popular blogging platforms out there, I've just found that for what I use these things for I can make it just fine using something simple and my own brain (which is also, perhaps, something simple, who knows). My idea of a plugin is to find the spot in the code where the new snippet will work and paste it in, which perhaps makes me a sort of Neanderthal in terms of coding, but I have yet to blow up a server or hog resources or even get my site hacked. As for antispam, I've even worked that out. One line of code. End of spam flooding.

I'm sure one day I'll eventually find something more complex (or go back to WP or something) and do things to it to make it into what I want, but until I'm big enough to take that step on my own I'll be voting "Other."

Is your site an e-commerce site (as the OP mentioned)?
 

essellar

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Is your site an e-commerce site (as the OP mentioned)?

Hardly matters. You can use the same APIs that the bloatware uses; that's why payment processors and fulfillment services publish them. You trade effort (and skill) for efficiency, and you can get an order of magnitude better performance out of the same server. There is as a high a cost to using an "all singing, all dancing" platform as there is to custom development; the difference is when and how you pay.
 

fretwizz

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Hardly matters.
Depending upon experience level, it could matter. I still think WP is a bit easier to get a store up and running if you're going the plugin route (Jigoshop, WooCommerce, etc.). YMMV.
 

essellar

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Easier, but far more expensive, in the sense that you'll be out of pocket for expanded hosting costs if you have anything that smells like traffic whether people are buying things or not. I'm not kidding about the "order of magnitude" thing. At the low end, it means being able to run on hobby money (~$5/mo plus per-use API costs) rather than business money (>= $50/mo) until you're "ramen profitable"; at the high end it means quite literally tens of thousands per month in provisioning and power costs. You avoid a little bit of short-term pain, but like the Fram guy used to say, "you can pay me now, or you can pay me later."

If you're capable of doing the development at all, all you pay up front going the custom route is the opportunity cost of the time it will take you, and if you haven't chosen, say, Erlang or some enterprise flavour of Java as your platform, web development is pretty RAD these days, so that cost will be relatively low. And if you use PHP and steer clear of the culture that tries to turn PHP into Ruby on Rails (which is the way it is because, unlike PHP, Ruby has no native templating features) you'll end up with something that is much faster and far easier to grok and maintain.

On the other hand, yes, if you need to learn everything from the ground up in order to be able to do it yourself and your choice is WP, hire a dev, or wait a year to be up and running, then WP (or another CMS) might make sense in the short term. But again, it doesn't take much to hammer even the most streamlined and well-cached WP site into submission, even if it's sitting behind something like Cloudflare; you need to understand, really understand, that you're paying for the convenience.
 

chatngox

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I currently owns a wordpress site. When I started I felt like using a blog platform due to the facts that none self hosted sites are around blog type kind of site. If you running a self hosted wordpress just like me, you will feel different as to customization, don't need to pay for wordpress and running limited code/plugins. You can have post and pages. I tweaked the crap out of functions.php, themes and installed a few plugns and my site are different and felt like CMS more than a blog. bbpress also here to help if you're running a forum, buddypress makes it more social.

Well, joomla in my experience is different. First time users we jump straight into CMS, of course you can install plugins to make a portal which is essentially a blog. If you like showing off contents, then maybe this is for you? Forums and other stuff can be done with a plugin installed.

This is depends on your flavor of the platforms, they all have it's own stuff. Both can have themes, plugins, pages and stuff like that.
 

fretwizz

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This is depends on your flavor of the platforms, they all have it's own stuff. Both can have themes, plugins, pages and stuff like that.

I actually started with Drupal, then tried Joomla for awhile and have spent more time on WP than either, mainly due to that's what clients want. IMO it's easier to setup a WP ecommerce site than either of the other two. Eseller makes a good point about developing things on your own, I just started in with angular.js and laravel (tried ruby on rails a long time ago), it's a bit of a struggle in spots because I'm an old dog trying to learn new tricks (teaching myself)... but I like it. Hmmm, I guess this is off topic for this thread (sorry;)
 

chatngox

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I actually started with Drupal, then tried Joomla for awhile and have spent more time on WP than either, mainly due to that's what clients want. IMO it's easier to setup a WP ecommerce site than either of the other two. Eseller makes a good point about developing things on your own, I just started in with angular.js and laravel (tried ruby on rails a long time ago), it's a bit of a struggle in spots because I'm an old dog trying to learn new tricks (teaching myself)... but I like it. Hmmm, I guess this is off topic for this thread (sorry;)
Yeah. Big sites like Playstation Blog, Ubisoft Blog, Xbox Live's Major Nelson etc all using wordpress. Also Microsoft Word do support wordpress post writing on the go, not sure about others. I mean really up to that person.
 

breakinc

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First of all if you are creating an e-Commerce website, neither WordPress or Joomla are your best choices. I would consider something made exclusively for that particular genre. In my experience: Magento is the best possible e-Commerce Solution around Period. Then you have the others, which are still excellent sources, such as: PrestaShop and OSCommerce. Research into what scripts are available for your particular needs, you could check out AMPPS or Scriptaculous to see what is out there first. WordPress and Joomla are very popular but; they are not always the right fit for every application. Good Luck.
 

Gonrah

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Wordpress is blog oriented while Joomla is better for simple web site. Drupal is also a good choice if you're not satisfied enough by Joomla. To learn more maybe you should check this article or simply test them and see which one is better for your project.
 
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