Hello here,
I would like to create a new website and this time instead to do all the programming myself from scratch as I am used to do, I’d like to use some kind of Content Management system to facilitate my life.
I am struggling to choose between Wordpress and Joomla and I can’t really understand which is better, which one has less limitations and which one is more popular. In other words, what are the pros and cons of each? Any ideas and thoughts are very welcome.
You’re always going to get Wordpress fanboys who love and will always use Wordpress. But when it comes down to it, it’s really not that powerful beyond the basic standard page and post style website. You can do a lot of things to manipulate the way it displays content, but this can get complicated and really isn’t practical for the average person to understand. For example, many web portfolios are built with Wordpress and posts for them have lots of custom post types. This could get confusing. I’ve never used Joomla or Drupal but I would recommend looking into them as they are much more robust and once you’ve invested the time to learn how to customize them I believe they would be much less complex to maintain.
I love wordpress its best and easy to use and manage it easily.There are also many tutorial of wordpress available from which you can easily able to learn.
I advise that you try a free website builder - uCoz. It is like blogger but more powerful - it has a forum, email forms, user management and many other modules for a website. It even has online games module. There is the possibility to edit HTML and CSS.
I forgot to mention that my new site will offer music educational videos to be watched online. The site will need to have an easy media management system as well a Members only management system. A online payment system will be also needed to allow users to buy subscriptions.
I’m not a programmer, not much experience in coding, but I’ve used both Joomla and Wordpress, and find both easy to use, although I find Wordpress easier and more enjoyable. I would suggest you have an indepth look at both. Wordpress themes/designs are warmer, more welcoming and there’s more of them around. Joomla templates tend to be official-looking, or business-like, but can be customised… There is a Joomla module for video called Seyret Video, which may interest you. And for Wordpress, there’s Wordpress Video Plugin… I would say that Wordpress is more widely used, so there are more people developing plug-ins and themes for it on an ongoing basis… That might be a consideration.
I’m not an expert with them, but I believe you can easily integrate JW Media Player into either WordPress or Joomla – I can’t think why not, as it’s a Flash thing… but I might be completely wrong!!!
They claim that JW Player is the most popular Flash video player and with so many people using WordPress and Joomla, I can’t see any Flash player becoming popular without being compatible with either one or both of them… but like I say, I’ve not used it myself… I might try it on my wordpress blog and joomla site tomorrow and let you know…
Maybe it would be easier to simply embed YouTube videos into your Wordpress or Joomla blog – that’s definitely possible with Worpress as I just did it now with mine. You wouldn’t have to host the video either. You could just upload it to YouTube’s servers, and then place the object/embed code on your site… that will show the video on your site, so the visitor stays on your site.
You can also consider Drupal. I’ve setup 2 websites fairly quick with no programming. They have modules you can add for just about anything, blogs, polls, images, videos, shopping carts, etc… Check out my IT site in my signature for an idea of what they can look like.
Yes Jessica, that’s the fact: what I am trying to figure out here is what C.M. system is better for me: I am not going to create a blog, I am going to create a site for video delivery with the use of a shopping cart system as well a Membership subscription system that allow users to subscribe as Members and watch the our video archives online. Any thoughts?
You see, I admittedly do not have much experience with Joomla. Either I use WordPress or I code it myself and I personally feel that it is the best option for me. I am afraid I cannot tell you much about Joomla either for nor against it, the same being true for Drupal or the most recent version of vBulletin since I have not used it yet. (I myself am thinking of switching over to IPB anyway. ;-P) All I can say is listen to what I have to say about WordPress since I am somewhat of a WordPress expert and listen to what Joomla experts have to say about Joomla and make your decision from there. I am working on a shopping cart extension for CakePHP simply because I do not trust the ones available on CakeForge.
If you are proficient with PHP, you can code one yourself quite easily using a framework like CakePHP. I am looking at CakePHP for a project I am working on. I do wish you the best of luck in your decision.
Thank you Jessica, of course I could code in PHP but that’s exactly what I wanted to avoid this time. I would like to be able to have a website up and running as fast and as easily as possible.
Thank you again for your thoughts, I will look anyway into your suggested resources.