Irma L. Olguin Jr.

I’m a programmer and I build things for the web.

There are a lot of cases where I need to build a website, then hand over the reigns so the client can add to and edit the site I’ve built after I’ve setup all the initial necessities.  This could happen for a number of reasons, but you can guess that it happens a lot.  In fact “content management” is all the rage in my business these days with clients requesting the ability to “change this or that” without having to pay a programmer.  That’s fair, I think.  I would want the same.  It’s like wanting to be able to change your own oil without paying a mechanic.  Sure, for the heavy-duty stuff, I want an expert, but for something that happens every couple of months, I’d like to do it myself.

I spend quite a bit of time  learning about and vetting tools I might one day want to use, so I’m always on the lookout for a bangup CMS.  Here are the criteria I use (loosely):

• It’s got to be something I can use, customize, and present to my client without a lot of tutoring.
• I want them to be impressed with what they can do as much as I want them to be impressed with how easy it is.
• I want to be able to “lock it down” enough so that they can’t hurt the initial design without trying pretty hard.
• I want to be able to brand it.
• I want to be able to program custom things in a structured manner without hacking the core of the CMS.
• There should be some community support so that I have somewhere I can turn when I mess up.
• There should be decent documentation so I can look up the things I want to break.
• It should be lightweight.
• I shouldn’t have to design a site around the CMS.  Best case scenario, I should be able to “plug-in” the content management capabilities after I’ve fabricated something amazing.
• I’d rather not learn an entirely new vernacular to understand what’s being done.
• Likewise, I don’t want to have to teach one to my client.

That’s a pretty tall order, for sure, but I know it can be done.

I recently had the unfortunate experience of taking a site that was designed by an artist and building it against the Joomla framework.  And boy howdy, I hated nearly every second.  Joomla is bloated, slow, complicated, and not at all client-friendly.  The amount of “changing” necessary to turn it into a simple end-user experience is simply not worth the time.

I often do WordPress customizations, and from the first line of code, to the last bit of content, WordPress is far and away a better experience.  I started with WordPress a couple of years ago, before it even got pretty, and it’s been a worthy experience the whole way.

I know the arguments.  ”Wordpress was built for blogging first, and content management second.”  ”Joomla is a do-it-all product.” “They’re apples and oranges.”  ”They weren’t built to do the same thing.”

I don’t care.

Joomla probably has more extensions than WordPress (I don’t know, I didn’t count), but from a usability perspective Joomla, flatly, sucks.

I think it was best put in this article here (emphasis added),:

“…WordPress is at a point in its progression where it can handle many simple web content management use cases but has not yet achieved a level of complexity as to detract from its usability. It has truly become a viable lightweight CMS – not just a blogging tool. This makes WordPress and platforms like it (Movable Type, Expression Engine, etc.) disruptive technologies in the classic Christensen disruption modelwhere a simple technology reaches a point where it can compete against a more complex incumbent that over-delivers in functionality.”

Playing With Wire has a really great comparison between the two, that I feel, sums it all up.  We take the classic need to create a page and compare how it’s done in each of the systems.  This is the kind of task that I need to accomplish in 100% of the content managment projects I complete:

Joomla!

1. From the ‘Control Panel,’ click ‘Add New Article.’
2. Select a ‘Title,’ the right ‘Section’, and then the right ‘Category.’
3. Write the content and save it.
4. From the top-menu, select ‘Menu’ and ‘Main Menu’ (assuming you want to add it to the main menu.)
5. Click ‘New.’
6. Select ‘Internal link,’ and ‘Articles,’ and then finally ‘Article Layout.’
7. Fill in the title of the object as well as the parent item.
8. In the column to the right, you now need to browse your list of articles and select the desired article.
9. Press ‘Save.’

WordPress

1. From the Dashboard, click ‘Pages.’
2. Select ‘Add New.’
3. Fill in the title and contents.
4. Select the parent item (if other than root.)
5. Click ‘Publish.’

Are there things that Joomla! does that WordPress does not do?  Probably, but I haven’t yet found one that I needed.  Is there anything that matters more than that?