You can’t create huge social networks with Wordpress though.
By social network I’m referring to something with functionality of Digg or Yelp. I can’t speak of Wordpress MU. I suspect it’s still so new that maybe it’s not as dependable as other CMSs. However, to anyone, I wouldn’t recommend WP if you’re doing something large in scale that would involve sub-blogs and user customization.
I have seen a CMS which could handle multiple blogs, forums and pages. It never made it out of kinda somewhere between a alpha and beta testing stage. That might be the type of CMS to go for though if your limited as to how many databases you can have.
I’m a joomla and a wordpress professional. Wordpress is by far better for clients. Joomla is good for web people that are going to put the effort into learning it.
Even though wordpress is a simpler cms, it’s programm hooks allow it to be more extensible then what joomla allows.
Joomlas a BRICK and wordpress is more like CLAY.
Trust me, I’ve torn both of them down and rebuilt them both.
I agree with jonathon, I support 200+ customers on a single version of Joomla, copied to all their directories, and it’s not easy to do. The administration interface and the section/category/article model is difficult for them to grasp. Throw in a textarea to edit CSS, as is WP, and it’s just plain nightmarish. For the techie types, like me, it’s nice because it gives you a lot of control but I’ll use VIM or some IDE to edit the CSS, not the interfaces. I’ve hacked Joomla a lot, namely getting subscriptions to work with VirtueMart, and am tinkering with Wordpress over the next couple weeks.
Both are lacking the advanced stuff I need but I’m probably the exception. For most people WP is probably the way to go. GL
P.S. I had to throw this in. My biggest disappointment with Joomla is it’s OS and like every OS project it begins to struggle to keep up as it matures because well, people have jobs. They’ve been promising a good group management model but it hasn’t come yet. That was back in 2007. Some day, I just couldn’t wait.
That depends on who wrote the statistic because Joomla and Drupal also seem to claim to have the most popular CMS.
EDIT: I stand corrected WP wins 2009 Most Popular CMS and Drupal wins Most Popular PHP CMS and Inaugural Hall of Fame award: http://www.packtpub.com/award
Personally I am a huge fan of Drupal. Joomla not so much because the user interface doesn’t make sense to me but I haven’t worked on a Joomla site for at least a year and things may have improved. WP although I haven’t used for a real job seems nice and looks like it has an extremely large following.
I’m for wordpress also… great CMS… you can blend it also in existing websites using CSS.
I have done that twice… this is one… blog
I wouldn’t recommend any CMS if you are going to do something with the functionailty of Digg as things like Drupal perform like a dog without huge amounts of caching, which is going to be a problem for a Digg like site that gets even remotely busy.
And incidentally for those who want social networking with WP, they should be looking at BuddyPress which builds social networking on top of WP MU.
plim_plom: Good point on caching. Once the site is good to go, get into the admin and set up caching and script/css compressing. It willl speed things up greatly. When you’re doing maintenance or updates be sure to turn it off and clear the cache though or you won’t see your changes 