EasyBlogger for Joomla - The death of Wordpress

[Mark Atkinson]

I will probably never create another Wordpress site again!

Not that I was ever really a fan of Wordpress, but this fantastic component really puts a nail in the coffin.

There is practically nothing it can't do!
Joomla's one weakness was always blogging and user-friendliness. For $79 ($200 for developer license) that weakness gets turned into a serious strength.

Honestly, it has everything. Complete social integration, privacy, team blogging, great design right out the box, super easy to customize... the list goes on!

I cannot praise it enough, really. Have a look for yourselves: http://extensions.joomla.org/extensi...ent/blog/12630

All my future client sites + blogs will use Joomla. It makes me so happy to say that. I'm just so upset that I didn't really come across this and test it before I painstakingly set up our blog using Wordpress for Joomla. Well we actually knew about the component, but wow, I didn't know it was this good.

[Dave A]

Tell me when it's a one step process to add a static page to Joomla and I'll get excited.

[Mark Atkinson]

Tell me when it's a one step process to add a static page to Joomla and I'll get excited.

Only 2 steps at the moment.

And as I think I mentioned to you Joomla 2.5 adds some really nice and much needed functionality in terms of user-friendliness.

[Norri]

Mark have you tried Drupal? I can't stand the code in WordPress but I find it quite easy to use and the sheer number of themes + plugins helps. Having said that, I don't use it because I made a conscious decision, years ago, after in-depth research into the top 3 candidates at the time (WordPress, Joomla & Drupal) to use Drupal for all my future endeavours and so I've become a bit of a Drupal guru. That doesn't mean I think it's better than the others ALL THE TIME but, as far as the code and extensibility is concerned, the others can't TOUCH Drupal. Also, in terms of scalability, Drupal is just amazing.

I use Drupal plus a few modules to run:
- A project management portal for my clients and my staff. (Took me a day to set up)
- A training portal for my staff. (I'm a big fan of hiring Filipinos) (Another day here)
- My main business (www.just1.co.za) runs entirely on Drupal. Each website is a post in Drupal. (Weekend for beta)
- I intend on creating a CRM portal with it and more. (Probably a day)

It's just so flexible and I've achieved all the above with nearly zero code thanks to Drupal's views module, plus a few of it's other cool modules.

Regarding usability, what I do is I set up a user-friendly version of Drupal that has a handy admin menu with only the necessary links, nothing else, plus a WYSIWYG editor and a forms module (for my clients who will be just updating now and again, as well as blogging and sending newsletters) and then I copy and paste that install for each client. Actually my employee does but the point is the same, it's easy

Here's a sample: http://j1u.maxiware.co.za/

Dave, it's a one step process to add a static page to Drupal But I DON'T suggest trying to use Drupal if you don't have someone to make it user-friendly for you. It is rather user-unfriendly out the box.

[Dave A]

Are those just1 client websites built with Drupal too, Norri?

[Norri]

Dave, yes they are but it's actually just one installation of Drupal with each website being a single entry in the database. (Technically not a single entry but you get my drift. )

[Dave A]

But I DON'T suggest trying to use Drupal if you don't have someone to make it user-friendly for you. It is rather user-unfriendly out the box.

In that respect my experience is Drupal and Joomla have that challenge in common (I've worked with both). The early learning curve is steep - way steeper than Wordpress...

Which is why I suspect celebrating the death of Wordpress may be a bit premature.

[Norri]

I have to agree with you, Dave. WordPress is gonna be around for a LONG time to come. Even though some of the code is shoddy, the quick & easy installation beats EVERYTHING out there. There's just nothing easier for a newbie.

[Mark Atkinson]

Which is why I suspect celebrating the death of Wordpress may be a bit premature.

Oh I have no doubt it will be around for a long time to come - It entails less of a learning curve than the others and for that reason people who aren't adept at CMS setups will generally opt for the Wordpress route.

Perhaps the title of this post is a bit misleading then. Put it this way, Wordpress is dead to me. There is now nothing I (me, not necessarily you) really cannot do using Joomla which I can see the need to do. Everything is covered - Simple info sites to massive e-commerce solutions, small personal blogs to huge information repositories, directories and a whole lot of other things. It's all there now. Even at present, we're developing each type of website I've just mentioned. And every one of these sites is based on Joomla.

I simply have no use for Wordpress anymore.

Mark have you tried Drupal?

I won't say I've really tried Drupal. I researched it yes, dabbled a bit, but that's about it. I, just as you did, made a decision to focus on Joomla as my CMS of choice. We have really put a whole lot of time and effort into making sure we know all the ins and outs of the Joomla CMS. We are even working at contributing towards the Joomla project on a development level.

I won't say Drupal is better or worse than Joomla, but I will definitely say that Joomla is an extremely powerful all-round competitor.

In terms of usability and user-friendliness I would put Wordpress on the good end and Drupal on the not so good end. I feel that Joomla sits in the middle which is perfect for me.

At Red Giant we are extremely design-centric. It's my experience that with Joomla we just don't seem to be limited at all in terms of design. As for Wordpress and Drupal, I feel they fall short. Again, my opinion is not completely qualified because I don't profess to have used Drupal extensively.

Norri, I think you and I appeal to different parts of the market and we produce a different kind of product altogether. Joomla just works perfectly for what I need to do with it.

[sanimoyo]

Are those just1 client websites built with Drupal too, Norri?

It will be so so so hard to steal us the wordpress brigade over.

[emaderam]

I agree with Mark. I can understand why someone would choose WP for a simple blog and it's probably a little easier to administrate than Joomla. But I've always preferred Joomla to WP or other CMS. Joomla is very good, there's a lot of great free and commercial extensions available, pretty steap learning curve for an administrator though. Drupal is also a great platform to create complex sites, but I'm not a fan of it just because I don't wanna learn another system. Joomla meets all my current requirements. I don't think there's a "best one" of them.... it depends on your goal and technical expertise. There are some useful resources which can help you have a right choice when choosing your needed CMS. I recommend two pages providing a comparison chart of WordPress, Joomla and Drupal: http://www.threehosts.com/ratings/wordpress-vs-joomla-vs-drupal.html and http://www.rackspace.com/knowledge_c...-and-wordpress. Both present the information in an easy-to-understand format. For you who are going to set up a website except blog, the best recommendation I can give you is to do some good research on other available products so that when you made your final decision you can stick to it and don't have to change the whole system after some time because this then can get time consuming and causes additional costs. A full list of these programs is available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...gement_systems. But the most popular ones are presented on http://www.simplescripts.com/script_list. Platforms on SimpleScripts are categorized and this helps you make your decision more easily.