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My previous post where I mentioned WordPress reminded me that I really needed to offer my opinions about these two very popular OpenSource platforms in relation to blogging. I used WordPress for over two years as my blogging solution. I set up Joomla just to play with the CMS system and learn about it and realized that maybe I could combine my blog posts along with what had become my personal site where I shared photos with friends and family. Along this journey, I came to realize some advantages and disadvantages to these two platforms, thus my opinions on the two now . . . . WordPress is a force, there is no doubt! They now offer free servers and accounts to get you started. And if your very raw to the whole blogging thing, my up front suggestion would be to head on over to WordPress and sign up! But if you have access to your own server and are going to install one of these to accomplish your goal of successfully blogging, lets hold up and talk about a few things. Ask yourself what you want to accomplish! If you just want to offer your thoughts mostly in the form of text, then WordPress is the easist way to do it! You basically log in, offer your thoughts, and hit the save button and it appears on your page! And if you want more, there are all kinds of plug ins to extend its capabilities. But if you want to do more than just blog, and do things on a grander scale, Joomla is certainly the way to go. Because its so much more powerful, its going to take more effort to get it rolling however. And its very much supported by all kinds of third party solutions to make things happen. The main difference between the two is that WordPress was designed from the ground up to do blogs! Joomla on the other hand is designed from the ground up to be a Content Management system. And managing content expands much beyond blogs, to include media, and the layout, and to create mailing lists and community. There are some advantages and disadvantages to the Joomla solution. One is "ping". WordPress got this one right as it pings Technorati as soon as you post something. Joomla is more of a manual process. You can literally spend days setting up and reconfiguring the look of Joomla! Some might hate this, but others will love it! But for sure, Joomla gives you much more control over your content! How it looks, the lay-out and more! Plus, Joomla offers new menu buttons to point to new components such as Photo Albums, and on and on and on. WordPress will do a lot but you usually accomplish this through a plug that often is a snippett of code that you embedded in your page. The biggest complaints I have with these platforms as blogs: - WordPress: It seems that spammers zoom in on the comment path and start spamming your comments section. It might not be bad at first but it ends up over time to where I was getting 70-80 spams a day. Now I had these comments set for me to approve, so they were easy to delete, but it stil took time. Then I got the idea to block certain IP addresses because of the amount of spam they were sending me. This still took major time and was a constant battle. The only way to stop the spam was to close the item entirely of comments, and isn't that the whole purpose of a blog? And as I mentioned, many of the plug-ins were clunky to install and get to function properly. I am not uncomfortable doing most of these, and I still messed up my templates a few times by getting things out of order . . .
- Joomla!: Its not so automatic! To get blogs to places like Technorati will require that you manually ping them. This isn't a big deal, but it still requires that I do it! Joomla is not set up for people to add comments out of the box either. So this means that you will need to install a third party solution so that others can add comments. I am using an app now that needs captcha input from the poster before it will take. Since the hacker gained access to my site and deleted several things, I haven't recieved ANY messages, so I am not sure if this is a turn off or not . . . I do know I like not having to delete about 400 spams once a week however!
But there are other pluses to Joomla that I just love!', ' And those are things such as the fact that I can install so many things to expand Joomla to be a very powerful personal site. Now I am telling you! If you want to keep it simple and just spend your time offering up a blog topic, WordPress is the king! But if you are looking to expand your blog to do many amazing things beyond blogs, Joomla is amazing! Just be aware that many of these third party add ons can leave security holes as I have experienced on several of my Joomla sites. But the bottom line here is that I very much enjoy all the options that Joomla offers me! The ability to easily change the look and feel. The joy I get out of designing and tweaking templates. In short, I love Joomla! The ability to expand its capabilities in an easy way by installing new components and modules is a much more powerful solution! So here is my suggestion for anyone looking to blog . . . If you want to keep it simple, WordPress is the way to go. Log on, write your thoughts, and publish! You can't beat simple. If your wanting to do a little more and expand with the abilities of Sections and menu buttons dedicated totally to other things outside of a web log, Joomla will be much more effort up front, but its easily managed going forward .
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