The End of Joomla in Boston?
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- Duane Mitchell
- Hero Rocketeer
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- Technology consultant
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I am a big fan of Joomla. I started using it with the first version having been a Mambo user. And I really love Rockettheme products for Joomla. I've built some nice websites with these products. Joomla is about nonexistant here in Boston. There is no community and just the occassional user. WordPress has been coming on big in the last year or so with some major institutions using it for large sites. It's mostly the multi-site feature that attracts them. Representatives from these institutions, like The Boston Globe, attend tech meetups and announce opportunities for jobs.
This is creating a lot of buzz for WordPress as the best and easist platform to develop a website on. Clients expect it. Period. They have never heard of Joomla and I have to sell it to them. I know that if something does not go right then it will be the choice of platform that gets questioned along with my decision making. If I can build it with WordPress and keep everyone happy I do.
There's two problems I have with Joomla. First, I don't have confidence in them as an organization that can produce cool and cutting edge software. I want to stress "as an organization". There's talented individuals who could. I know that recently there's been some turmoil organizationally. I also read an organization document on the Joomla site that struck me more as being an outline for madness. The second problem is the increasing strength and presence of WordPress along with it's worldwide popularity.
In the last few months I have switched to WordPress as my first choice of platform. I am hoping that Rockettheme continues to develop its WordPress offerings so I can use those tools on an equal footing as I do Joomla.
I don't know what anyone else is seeing in their part of the world but I think that when a technologically savvy city like Boston drops Joomla it is cause for concern. I'd be happy to hear thoughts and I'd be especially happy to hear for other Bostonians. Perhaps we can do something to promote this platform. -
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- Next Generation Solutions | www.nxgnsol.com | 617-539-6050
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- MrT
- Preeminent Rocketeer
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We will continue to develop for Joomla and Wordpress as well as the other platforms. Now that we have Gantry 5 you will find that switching between Joomla and Wordpress is not as onerous as it once was. The Gantry 5 framework has been developed from scratch to work on many CMS's (Joomla and Wordpress being the first two). Once you using Gantry 5 you will find that it looks and works much the asame way on both Joomla and Wordpress platforms. I should also add that Gantry 4 is not going anywhere, this is where the bulk of our portfolio in templates reside as present, we will continue to support Gantry 4 for the foreseeable future.
As to You specific points about Joomla vs Wordpress - they have both been around for some considerable time and undoubtedly Wordpress has a greater market share than Joomla. But the choice of CMS is yours to make, rest assured that RT will support as many CMS's as we can with Gantry 5 as long as they have a significant market share (and Joomla still does).
Thank you for your comments.
Regards, Mark. - Please search forums before posting. Please make sure your post includes the version of the CMS you are using and a link to the problem. Annotations on screenshots can also be helpful to explain problems/goals. Please use the "secure" tab for confidential information.
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- Brian Shea
- Sr. Rocketeer
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- Web Management, Server Admin, Google Apps Service Provider
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Duane, I think a part of the Wordpress frenzy is that they had a free platform available that was easy to get people to use. Joomla had to be installed on a web host.
And it's hard to compete with the marketing of the masses when they only know what they hear.
I just had someone looking for something more than Weebly or Web.com. They mentioned they heard Wordpress is the easy solution.
They installed Wordpress and then had no idea what to do. Still with the Pages vs Post issue, with comments.
Remember when Joomla had Static Pages and Article Content? That was hard to explain, along with the Sections/Categories, but Joomla finally changed things (with too much disruption, but at least they made it better).
I still don't get WordPress. I find their documentation is a bit scattered, still, after a decade. But I know designers love it. And 'normal' people just go with what is popular.
Luckily, Joomla finally has a free demo: demo.joomla.org/
You can have your client check out the demo (use the 'quick launch' demo that expires), and let them see what the basics are like.... content, modules, menus. Keep it simple.
Content can- be 'pages', or it can be a blog type of thing.
Menu's decide what the 'main pages' will be, like the basic About pages.
Menu's can display one page at a time, or a blog display of multiple content.
Modules can be many things that you can place where you want on different pages.
Having them get a view of how to manage both Wordpress and Joomla helps them decide which one they are more likely to learn better.
I've had a few people move from Joomla to Wordpress, thinking it would be much better. And all they ended up doing is having to learn a different way of doing the same thing. (the problem was that they never took the time to figure out Joomla, yet for some reason they found the time to learn Wordpress because they 'heard' it was better.)
The internal organization stuff of Joomla, well, everything has that. BitCoin just had a minor revolt last week. Joomla came out of a Mambo revolt. It's just unfortunate that we have to rely on such instability on the web. - be 'pages', or it can be a blog type of thing.
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- Duane Mitchell
- Hero Rocketeer
- Posts: 296
- Thanks: 5
- Technology consultant
- Thanks for the reassurance Mark. I've been very satisfied with RT over the years and want to continue using RT tools and themes.
- Next Generation Solutions | www.nxgnsol.com | 617-539-6050
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- Duane Mitchell
- Hero Rocketeer
- Posts: 296
- Thanks: 5
- Technology consultant
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Certainly some people get too much of the marketing hype into their system and think it's easy to setup a website on their own. Wordpress.com and Facebook contribute to that. But this is way beyond that here in Boston. It isn't end users or small businesses who are making the choice between Joomla or WordPress. It's some of the best and brightest developers at some of the renowned institutions that are making the switch. Mostly from Drupal. Joomla isn't even in the discussion.
Much of what is driving this it the multi-site feature. The Harvard School of Public Health is a WordPress multi-site project. They have over 1800 sites running. All the departments and professors get their own site. If a plugin gets updated you just update the one and not 1800 of them as you would have to do with Joomla. The other given is that you write your own plugins for whatever it is that other plugins don't do. Of course you have a development team for that. So what WordPress offers the development community here is a well organized body of code, multi-site, and the ability to extend that code with your own development.
I still like Joomla better for many reasons. I like ACLs. Let's me build sites for community groups and set access for different roles. I like K2 for content creation. I love Rockettheme and it's extensions for design and functionality. I like Akeeba Backup, Admin Tools, and sh404SEF for URL management. Community Builder is great. Project Fork for collaboration on projects. There's quite a number of good extensions. - Next Generation Solutions | www.nxgnsol.com | 617-539-6050
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- MrT
- Preeminent Rocketeer
- Posts: 101084
- Thanks: 13484
- Web Designer/Developer
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I don't think I can add much more really.
For me Joomla is the better tool for building proper applications (as opposed to just a static page websites). The thing about both Wordpress and Joomla is they have been around a long time so any shortcomings they might have are, more often than not, addressed with third-party extensions/widgets - so today you can do pretty much the same thing with either platform (especially with Gantry 5).
AS I said, the choice can only be yours really.
Regards, Mark. - Please search forums before posting. Please make sure your post includes the version of the CMS you are using and a link to the problem. Annotations on screenshots can also be helpful to explain problems/goals. Please use the "secure" tab for confidential information.
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