I have turned out a number of websites in both Joomla! and WordPress and I can tell you that both have their advantages and disadvantages. A typical engagement will begin with the requirements gathering. What would you like for your site to do? Although, Joomla! does have blogging capabilities, I tend to favor WordPress in that category for it’s ease of use. Some clients have more business oriented requirements such as user management, subscription management, e-commerce functionality and additional security requirements. With more complicated requirements, I tend to lean in the direction of recommending Joomla!.

WordPress – Primarily built as a blogging platform, the WordPress Codex allows for some pretty excellent flexibility when creating WordPress powered sites. There are plugins that allow for more feature integration that give visitors a more compelling experience when visiting a WordPress site. Another virtue of the platform is that is allows for Search Engine Friendly URLs while creating blog posts automatically. The CSS and skinning of a WordPress site is very intuitive for knowledgeable developers which make for the opportunity to make some really cool looking sites.

Joomla! - Has a very large and global developer base that offers both commercial and non-commercial plugins, components and modules that are easily integrated into your site. Depending on the requirements of the site, chances are that there is one right for you. From a business analysis perspective, some of the modules that have been designed for other verticals can be customized for your site by an experienced PHP developer. While Joomla! is primarily used as a Content Management System, there are attributes that allow blogging. By default the search engine friendly URLs are not enabled by the administrative settings allow you to switch that over. Although the CSS is not quite as straight forward as WordPress sites, there are some pretty flashy things that you can do with some of the available Joomla! styles out there.

Please keep in mind that the following are base on my opinions in my experiences with both. I would love to hear your feedback on whether or not you agree.

Feature/ Function	Joomla!	WordPress
Blogging	C	A
CMS Functions	A	B
Admin Interface	C-	A
Available Plugins	B	C
Ease of Design Customization	C	A
Ease of Deployment	B	A
Support Community	A	A
Search Engine Friendly	C	A
Article Publishing	B	A
Documentation	A	A
E-commerce	B	C
Update Services (writing)	C	A
Update Services (programs)	D	A
User Management	A	A
Forum Integration	A	A

In summary, I tend to lean more towards WordPress and am looking forward to working with Expression Engine but, I have an immense familiarity with Joomla! to the point where I continue to recommend it. WordPress sites seem to be quicker to deploy than most and have all the basic functionality that a blogger would need but, WordPress would require some knowledge of the Codex in order to make the site function as more of a CMS. Out of the box it would make a blogger happy but may need to be fine-tuned for a business. While the administration portion of Joomla! may not be as intuitive as that of WordPress, it is extremely built out with additional functions that allow it to operate as more of a CMS on initial deployment. As the clients do more in the back-end of Joomla! they become more familiar with where everything is and more about how to customize their site’s content.

One benefit, recently making headlines, is that online video is highly searched. Evidence to that would be You Tube surpassing Yahoo!’s search engine in the rankings. While it may come to no surprise to some, others may prefer more static search results in the form of a list or summary. Being able to visualize something definitely has its benefits. Some may argue that the result of the video search surpassing a traditional engine could be as a result of the current political climate and the ability to be able to recall previously recorded events and broadcasts. Nevertheless, You Tube is the second highest search used next to its parent Google.

When deciding to go the video route, there are some important factors to take into consideration. Most of which, could be considered disadvantages. We have outlined a couple of the most important ones for you.

Bandwidth - My personal favorite for reasons that I will not go into here. If your technology infrastructure does not support it, find someone’s that does. Without understanding the burden of streaming media, many organizations make the mistake of trying to host their own content. The argument is often in regards to who owns the content. Let a service provider stream the media for you, that’s what they specialize in and they have the infrastructure to support it. Rights to the content, more often than not, are identified as remaining the clients’. If not taken into consideration, viewers, will more than likely experience some buffering problems with their user experience.

Time and Other Resources – Rendering a video on a computer takes a substantial amount of memory and can sometimes bring your workstation to its knees. If you have the benefit of a dual-core, or even a quad-core processor, you may notice less of an impact. The fact of the matter is that there are still file fragments than need to be stored in temporary memory when rendering a video. All of the file processing takes time. In some instances, we have seen dedicated machines used for rendering video for this reason. Send your graphics guy to a long lunch if you decide to borrow his box. (This, of course, depends on the size/ length of the video)