It seems to me from the little research I have done that, while Wordpress has thousands of free templates available, most very high quality, Joomla has very few - and those free ones that are available for Joomla often aren’t very good quality.
I understand that Wordpress is, well… Wordpress, but Joomla is very popular too. Joomla also has a profusion of paid templates.
Has anyone else observed this? And if so, is there an explanation beyond “Wordpress is more popular”? If not, I’d love to hear about the best sources of free Joomla templates.
There is usually a vast siding with one product or the other.
VHS and Beta (beta was the superior, but VHS is what caught on)
Firefox and IE (Firefox is the superior, but because MS packaged IE as the default browser with most users, it’s what they use)
I was looking for products to compliment my video editing software, and most things were made for Premiere Pro (which is what I use) and significantly less for other similar products like Sony Vegas.
It’s not that Vegas is bad, it’s just not as well received as Premiere.
Wordpress is a lot more common than Joomla, in my experience, with a lot lower entry-level barrier (though I could be wrong, never having used Joomla).
Joomla templates are a real pain to make. There are sites with free templates available (just google away), but the quality varies wildly. The better templates are usually paid.
That’s not to say that the quality of wordpress templates don’t vary wildly–they do. There’s just a lower bar to entry. The PHP code used is fairly straight forward, it’s documented fairly well, and there is a large community that supports and can act as a resource if you run into problems.
With Joomla…their documentation is spotty at best, often missing very key points that a whole feature would hinge upon. What makes it worse is that the templating system is quite clunky to work with. There’s also not much of a solid developer community to speak of, so beyond support for basic usage, the support of a large community isn’t there. Joomla developers tend to straddle the fence between paid and free, with popular extensions eventually sliding from free into paid territory.
I’m surprised everyone seems to agree that WP templates are easier to do than Joomla. I only created a Joomla template once, but I thought it was relatively easy (heavy on the relatively ). I’ve never tried doing a Wordpress theme, but it looked pretty complicated to me.
). I’ve never tried doing a Wordpress theme, but it looked pretty complicated to me.