joomla or wordpress?

Support Other Software
1

Hi guys,

I’m currently planning to make a new site for myself, a better one than the googlepage thingy I have right now. I want it to be a dynamic, database driven one. So the first thing I came across was joomla. Read two books about it, only to find that a lot of buttons/functions are in slightly different places or do slightly different things. I’m having trouble just making menu’s appear (where I want them) or making (news)items appear where I want them, or have they categorised under certain menu’s etc etc.
Seems it’s not as straightforward as I hoped it’d be.
But that may be due to the vast posibilities that are possible with joomla.

But I can’t find any decent gallery/webcomic kinda plugins or themes for joomla. A big portion is going to be images/gallery, and maybe one or two small comics or the like. I’d like to manage these seperate from each other.
(for instance, when you make a new item, you can type in a shitload of text, but you can’t have it linked to an image item, the way you would think of a webcomic. yo can link images in the text though)
I also want some people to be able to register, maybe use a shop and/or allow clients to login sometime in the future. These are things joomla is supposed to be good at…

But then there’s wordpress. which seems to do comics/gallery stuff pretty good, but I’m not so sure about the other features I might need.

I don’t want to end up having to redo my site once I actually get it to grow and want to add new features, but I’ve been fighting with joomla for over a month now. Wordpress is looking more and more interesting every day (haven’t tried to actually use it yet though…)

What are your thoughts on this.
Should I stick with joomla? or go for wordpress?
what are the cons and pro’s?

and before you say “do some research”… I have, it’s just like, well not seeing the forest anymore because of all the friggin trees in it right now…

So i want to start with:

  1. me being able to post new items, comics and portfolio items. And manage them around without needing to change properties in like 3 different windows (like in every other CMS I’ve tried so far)
  2. set up rights for other users to post or comment (like allowing another friend of mine 3. to keep another webcomic and/or blog on the same site)
    eshop, client registring etc etc.
2

definitely try out Wordpress.

It’s easy to change the theme css and add plugins to get your site laid out how you like, and you can set up different contributer accounts to let your friend post. You can even separate his posts into a different page.

Also if you are looking for a good gallery try Singapore. I use it a lot for art galleries. Its a pretty simple grid of images that you can click on and see the whole image/information.

3

I’d say go with Joomla, I’ve used them both and Wordpress is just pretty much a blog.
It takes a while to learn but once you learn it is really good.

As for your gallery I tried out Phoca Gallery and it was pretty good.

4

Are you looking at hosting it yourself? If not have you found a host for Mambo/Joomla? Better to find a decent host than do it yourself imho unless you’re intending getting a basic LAMP setup from a hosting provider and install Wordpress / Joomla yourself?

As already said Wordpress is considered just a blog but I have seen some extreme customisation for delivering video and galleries that were very nice. http://www.press75.com/

Joomla’s a bit commercial for my liking, many of the better plugins cost and it’s a cms more than vid/image gallery blog, so more geared to multi user log in, intranet environment. Saying that there is a lot of commercial customisation and themes available for Wordpress as well.

I have a wordpress site (free) from www.wordpress.com and like the software a lot it feels far more stable and less hassle than Joomla. It’s quick and painless to install on a host that provides you with MySQL, php and Apache. ie a Linux server hosting package generally. Done that a few times as well for trialing. Lots of free Wordpress plugins and themes.

5

You probably already have, but check out www.opensourcecms.com to be able to “test run” lots of CMS options on their live setup.

I agree about Joomla feeling too commercial… its almost like it was set up for a news site primarily.

I like CMSMadeSimple for basic static content sites. However, it has a pretty small and limited, tho active, user/dev community, so there’s not a lot of sophistication in their modules just yet.

For a lot of built-in community-type tools/modules check out e107. Its pretty powerful out of the gate, but maybe not for what you’re doing. And it wasn’t the best for the static content portion when I checked it out.

Some hosts have side-load scripts pre-setup for a lot of CMS’ out there. (Where you don’t have to do the download-to-local then unzip and upload-to-host routine – it loads directly to your account online.) Pretty handy.

6

Wordpress is pretty easy to use and whatnot. I have one setup on my site and it’s working out welll. It’s really customizable as others have said. However I have not tried nor really heard of Joomla.

7

Check up Dupral
Also Typo is pretty fully customizable but I found it hard to learn as it has it’s own scripting language.
If you are into python you might also want to check out zope although that is more of a application type server thing then a ready to use store front end.

8

My personal preference is Wordpress. It is the easiest CMS to use.

9

I use Drupal. I personally like it better for full websites
I have made the below sites with it. PiXate is my side business



http://casemountain.org/

those 3 sites are 100% backend Drupal for every page.
btw, Drupal is open source.

10

Thanks guys, not sure what I’ll end up using yet, but those are some good links and arguments.
some more info:
@andrew: yes I’m looking for more than just a blog. I want a backend I can tweak/manage the crap out of when I need it, but… well, for instance, the CMS for our company’s website is terribly akward. If something needs to change for all items, you need to go through 2, 3 menus for each item and alter every single one of them, instead of just having a list of all, marking the option I want enabled/disabed, and apply to all.
I DON’T want to end up with something that makes me throll through menu after menu.
Unfortunately, maybe it’s because of me not knowing it’s workflow yet, but joomla seems cumbersome just like that cms from our company site. And phoca gallery seems nice for a gallery but I need to manage comics as well, read in the phoca forums that it wasn’t designed/usable for that…

@yellow:
yes I have a XXAMP setup on my old desktop on windows XP (which has two f*cked up linux distro’s at the time as well, yay for grub errors 15 and 17) and I’m testing some things in it now and then. i actually bought a book and read it beforehand, but there are buttons/options which aren’t where the book says they are, and I can’t find them elsewhere, or just to many of them (how many times can one find/apply/edit a menu(main, mainmenu, othermenu, user, etc etc) Which is really pissing me off by now.

@mzungu:
Thank you! No I hadn’t found any of those before. I did find a looooooooong list which listed and compared features for many cms systems (lost the link, was on the borked up linux distro)

@musk:
Thank you for drupal, I had this one bookmarked, guess I overlooked it.

Someone at work is using joomla for his own personal website. He doesn’t know the ins and outs of it, but he can make some stuff appear as he wants it too, guess that’s how I kinda got into joomla. But whenever I ask him questions about it we end up making some items and putting them into categories or such.

I found comicpress and wordpress when looking for a full fledged webcomic cms, but I’d like a backend for me and one or two people i might give rights as well.
And a frontend system. Where I can have areas that are off limits for non registered people. Where people can post comments if i have that enabled for a certain area. Maybe even post news items from there if that’s possible.

I think I’ll at least give wordpress/comicpress a go, on my local desktop host.

I want to start this thing as a hobby, have a little webcomic I never published on it, and migrate my blenderstuff (rigs, documentation, etc) to it.
Start with a good clean basic cms, and then expand it into my portfolio or hopefully freelance site or something.

11

Personally, I’m looking at re-building my site using Dokuwiki. I’m pretty much decided on it: it does most of the things I require the site to do, especially if you include all the plugins for it.

I am, however, quite lazy. There are far too many projects I’m half way through, and I’m just about to start a new job, so don’t expect anything too soon.