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.

hPDA Generation from your task lists

Originally uploaded by Godev Software Solutions

This image illustrates the ability to create hPDA Generation from your task lists, among other features. I have been assisting with the beta testing of the product and am excited about its launch. Some additional features include the ability to export and import tasks and a nifty little tag cloud that helps you to visualize the tasks that you have to do.

As a project manager, I can appreciate this tool and would recommend it to anyone to help them to outline their daily tasks. The software is developed in Adobe Air, which makes it operating system agnostic.

Check it out at Godev Software Solutions.