Joomla Chicago CMS Group

This is my first post, and I was wondering if I might get some feedback on Joomla vs. Wordpress. I found some statistics on Joomla Developer Trends and Joomla is steadily growing in popularity. Does anyone have any additional thoughts from the field? Thanks.

Certainly! Welcome to the Joomla! Chicago Users Group too!

Sometimes I think that Joomla and Wordpress can be used for the same things: blogs. Some people like Wordpress and will extend it to include things like e-commerce and forums, but that seems to be a huge stretch sometimes because Wordpress is a blogging platform. Joomla, on the other hand, is a system which is designed to help manage a lot of content (not necessarily blogs). In their most basic forms, Joomla and Wordpress may have similar functionality.

However, Joomla pulls ahead of Wordpress in my mind because it is more extensible. The basic features of Joomla are solid, but what makes Joomla so great is how easy it is to develop or install extensions. Wordpress is harder to extend to make it multipurpose, where Joomla is easily adapted to include e-commerce, forums, social networking, user generated content, etc.

Don't get me wrong, I have been using Wordpress for my blog, because that is all it is. Its great for that, although I'm going to be upgrading my site to a Joomla install and scrapping the Wordpress soon. I used Wordpress before Joomla, and I'm glad that I have both at my disposal, but Joomla has the upper hand when it comes to anything beyond basic blogging.

Thanks Jeremy. Sounds like I'm not the only one in this situation. I appreciate your taking the time to share your thoughts. I have just been blogging, but am looking to do more with my site, so I'm thinking it's time for me to move over as well. Thanks again.

If I was just going to blog, I'd go with Word Press.. in fact, I'd use one of the blogger sites, as they offer everything your going to get from Word Press, plus you get the power of the network.

But if you have more content, J! is the way to go.

Thanks Patrick. I do plan on more content and have started to figure out how to transfer to J! Any resources on the process out there? Is it complicated?

What do you mean by transfer. What system are you using now ? Installing Joomla and getting it running the first time is very easy.

I'm running Wordpress. How do I transfer to Joomla?

http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=75574 here is a post about it, hopefully it works!

reviews look positive.

Go look at the new component that corephp.com has just come out with. It is a marriage of Wordpress into Joomla. Worth checking out guys.